A program called the Argosy Fellowship brings a professor from UTEP to Olin each semester so that the professor can learn more about the Olin curriculum and teaching style and then take some of that back to UTEP. Shane was the first UTEP professor to come to Olin. He's a civil engineer, and because most of his work focuses on water and water treatment (and because the class needed a prof), he taught Transport.
Because Shane was at Olin to learn, the fact that this was an experimental course was very obvious in what happened in class. Courses change often at Olin, so students know that to some extent they're always guinea pigs, but if the class is going well, it's normally easy to forget that the class has something new or different. Professors are usually open to feedback, but most feedback is given at the end of the semester. Shane, though, was very intentional about requesting feedback throughout the class, and he made adjustments accordingly. He was willing to stop, ask us what was working and what wasn't, and listen. He also asked us broader questions about classes and teaching at Olin. What do we think of project-based learning? Is a project focus appropriate for all classes? How long should one project be? What is the role of lectures, and what is important in lectures? How should pre-lecture reading be incorporated? What types of problems should be in homework assignments, and how should those assignments be evaluated? What about exams? I'm still thinking about lots of these questions.
The class was centered around one thermal-fluid systems project through the whole semester. We split up into teams, and I worked with two other people, Lise and Nicholas, to build a small-scale solar water heater. The project was pretty rocky, but we ended up with a functional solar water heater, which was really exciting. We started off with lots of research about existing solar water heaters, and the component we decided to focus on was the collector. The collector is generally a box on the roof of a house, and water runs through the box and is heated. Our first design involved painting copper pipe black and bending it so that it filled an insulated box. We did some simulations of this, though, and didn't think we would get as much of a temperature increase in the water as we wanted. To increase the heat transfer to the water, we bought a laptop radiator and used that instead of copper pipe in the insulated box. Water ran from a tank to the radiator, where it was heated, and then back to the tank. Here's a picture of what we built:
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| Our solar water heater, all set up for data collection! The solar collector is on the chair. It's a wooden box with a plastic covering, and inside is a laptop radiator surrounded by insulation. The red cooler is our water tank, and there's a pump in the tank. The water flows through PVC from the tank to the collector and back. |
By the time the prototype was built, it was December, so the testing conditions weren't optimal (December in Needham isn't exactly warm and sunny), but we did manage to heat the tank of water from about room temperature to 35 degrees Celsius in a little over two hours.
Part of the project involved modeling and characterizing the fluid and heat flow in the system. Some of this was easy, but the radiator geometry is complicated, so for some characterization we just had to use experimental data from our system and do the theoretical calculations on the copper pipe design idea. Even modeling the copper pipe system was challenging, but we were able to develop both a set of partial differential equations that could be solved to give an exact solution and a simplified model that was much easier to simulate in MATLAB or Python. This was the part of the project into which I put the most work.
The main problem with the project was that we worked on it for the whole semester, but except for an initial literature review, the deliverables were all due in November and December. Shane asked for regular updates, but during the first half of the semester, other work usually came first. One of my professors once said that Oliners have an attitude of putting out the most immediate fire, and in those terms, when there isn't a deliverable in sight on a project, there are many other more immediate fires. Just in Transport, doing the reading or the homework assignments often seemed more important than working on the project because they were due sooner. When Shane talked to the class at the end of the semester, this was probably the most important piece of feedback we gave. Projects either need to be shorter, or they need to be a little more scaffolded. We had one design review and then the final presentation, and even just one earlier design review would have helped.
At the beginning of the semester, Shane's lectures consisted of going through slides based on the textbook and trying to cover most of the material in the book. If we had done the reading, this wasn't interesting, and if we hadn't, then the lecture often went too fast. It was also hard to tell what was important. Conversations with other professors as well as with us led Shane to focus more in the lectures instead of trying to cover everything, and that made the lectures much more useful. He also realized one day that the vast majority of the class hadn't done the reading, and after a few discussions about the purpose of reading before class and how that should be assessed, lectures began to incorporate some board work. Shane would ask us to draw graphs or figures that represented key ideas, and that would be the starting point of the lecture. It took a while for him to figure out what sorts of questions were right for this kind of discussion, but by the end of the semester, this part of class was a good lead-in to the details in the lecture, and we were usually doing the reading.
Transport is normally taught very mathematically and theoretically, but Shane taught a much more applied class. This came out not just in the project but in the homework assignments. Shane tended to choose problems that were helpful in thinking about how to design a system, and a couple of times (including on our final exam), he wrote very long problems that stepped us through designing a system. The first such problem was the design of various parts of a water treatment plant, and that came soon after we toured the Needham water treatment facility. The question on the final exam was about heating and cooling at Olin, and we had spent one of our last days of class touring Olin's HVAC plant. These questions were long, really computation heavy, and sometimes tedious, but I also found them very useful. I'm more inclined towards the theoretical, so getting more comfortable with the process of thermal-fluid system design was good for me.
I might have enjoyed a theoretical version of Transport more, but that's a result of my tendencies towards mathematics. As an engineer, though, Shane's Transport class was really useful, and I learned a lot. Working with thermal-fluid systems has made me even more convinced that this is one of the coolest mechE fields.
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