2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper, we explore the ability of engineering students to create architectures for engineering concepts. The conceptual design phase of the aerospace engineering capstone senior design course at national university involves students’ teams starting with an initial sizing of the high-level system, defining the system architecture to establish the main subsystems and functional block diagram, generating concepts for the different subcomponents, and finally selecting concepts for these subsystems via a qualitative method to define an initial design. To establish an initial design, students must make connections between the function of the subcomponent and the physical form that can achieve the desired function. A concept is selected when a function is mapped to a physical form from a selection of forms that perform similar functions. To explore their ability to create architectures (functional and physical), a module is introduced at the midpoint of concept generation and selection of the design process. This module will be a precursor to using the Pugh matrix and conducting sensitivity analysis. The student teams are required to select cleaning devices from a list based on their assumptions, map function to form of the different subcomponents, create levels of abstraction and identify aspects of distinction. The teams will further apply this knowledge to define architecture for their capstone project. As an example, function and form view and one to one mapping of these architectures for the teams working on an inflatable lunar rover will be shown. Assessment rubric is via a project proposal to assess the teams and a pre and post project survey to assess individual students.