2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One of the goals of an engineering education is to teach students to design. Ideally, professors will find a way introduce design projects alongside teaching the core curriculum. Textbook problems help lead into this by asking students to analyze or determine the capabilities of various components or systems. An excellent example of this is the second semester of the two semester Thermodynamics course which is typically focuses on various power cycles. While the real-world applications of these cycles are frequently alluded to, they are not always directly discussed. This proved to be an excellent opportunity to reinforce and practice the students’ design skills. This was accomplished while giving students an in-depth understanding of the potential cycles used for power generation. For this assignment, students were tasked with designing a small-scale powerplant capable of providing the university with 12 MW of power. The deliverables for this project included both a written report and an oral presentation. Restrictions included that all component capabilities must really exist. Therefore, students were required to research the components and efficiencies used in modern powerplants. Students were also given extra points for achieving the highest thermal efficiency in their class. This helped identify one of the shortcomings in the balance of research versus design. Students would initially blindly copy the most efficient power-plants in the world, without considering the fact that they were producing several hundred times the required amount of electricity. This project has been given over a period of four years, with slight variations in how the requirements were specified to the students. These differences that might seem minor on the outside, significantly impacted how the students researched the project and designed their final solution. As a multifaceted design project this assignment was also used to help access the junior level students’ progress towards meeting the ABET program outcomes.