2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper demonstrates the successful implementation of a hands-on, semester-long team project in a senior aerospace structural design course during the COVID pandemic. The class enrollment of 69 students comprised of 18 teams, each having either three or four members per team. This design course, required of aerospace undergraduates at ___University, focuses on the analysis of buckling failure mechanisms in thin-walled aerospace structures. A critical aspect of the course is a required project that gives experiential learning on the topics of design, shop procedures, manufacturability, testing, and analysis of an aircraft skin-stringer panel. Each student team was given the project criteria to fabricate, test, analyze, and optimize a stiffened panel representative of those typically found in aircraft structures. Prior to the pandemic, student teams designed their panels after receiving all technical information in class lectures, resulting in students conducting all steps of the project during the last three weeks of the semester. This became an impossible task during the pandemic due to the imposed physical distancing and safety requirements. We had the option of foregoing the project due to the unique circumstances; however, we felt that it was important to retain this hands-on experience not only for its benefits of increased student engagement, interest, and engineering self-efficacy, but also for the opportunity for peer collaboration. Thus, we modified the project so that the hands-on (manufacture and testing) aspects of the project occurred over a longer time period, thus allowing comfortable space and time for student teams to safely complete all aspects of the project. This was accomplished by giving the materials and the stiffened panel specifications such as stringer (Z and inverted hat) geometry, spacing, number of rivets, etc. to each team, thus allowing students to begin fabrication at the beginning of the course and test all articles by mid-semester. The end of the manufacture and test phases coincided with the completion of the technical material so that students could proceed with analysis and optimization of their panel design. The modified project format produced unexpected benefits. Students were able to gain a deeper understanding of manufacturability and design aspects since the technical material was presented concurrently with the hands-on manufacturing and testing of the panels. Students were also able to experience all aspects of the design process as an optimization module was required to improve upon their given panel geometry. Additionally, since different panel specifications were assigned to each team, the measured data set was used to develop a parametric evaluation, demonstrating the impact of changing stringer geometry.