Making Engineering Interesting Leads to NSF Grant

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Kemper E. Lewis, Ph.D., is borrowing from an ages-old, medical-school teaching method to instruct his students in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo.

"Just as medical students learn human anatomy through dissection, my students learn engineering through 'product dissection,'" said Lewis, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Students in Lewis's sophomore mechanical and aerospace engineering course disassemble, and then reassemble, a variety of complex products, including car engines, television/VCRs, copy machines, even a lawn mower. Most of the items are donated by companies, such as General Motors, and others find their way to Lewis via word of mouth among coworkers and students.

In the process, they are required to create a computer-aided-design entry that illustrates how the products are put together.

"They build a product in virtual space where they can perform simulation, adding forces and stresses, computationally," he said. "They create a virtual assembly sequence, where the parts fly in and are assembled in the virtual space."

Lewis introduced the approach in 2002 to combat what he and other engineering students encountered as undergraduates: boring lecture-style courses, with no opportunity for hands-on engineering until the later years of the program.

"The sophomore class is one of the first mechanical engineering courses, so students don't have to learn all this theory and then wonder what it's being used for.

"Now they see what it's used for. Then, when they start learning the theory, they remember 'Oh yeah, I took apart an engine. Now I realize what combustion means, how it works and where is it used,'" Lewis said.

The National Science Foundation has endorsed Lewis's methods by awarding him a two-year, $250,000 grant to develop digital designs from student projects to be included in a national repository of computer-aided design (CAD) data for consumer and industrial products.

Lewis is project director of the undertaking -- called CIBER-U: Cyber-Infrastructure-Based Engineering Repositories for Undergraduates -- which is being implemented in undergraduate engineering design courses at three partner institutions in addition to UB, including the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Missouri-Rolla and Drexel University. The data will enhance instruction and learning in engineering design courses and help with related issues regarding accessing, storing, searching and reusing CAD models and data.

Ultimately, Lewis and his colleagues at the other schools will use the designs to create a secure, national infrastructure where companies and institutions can share models, tools and software.

"Our nation has a number of infrastructures: the transportation infrastructure, the air transportation infrastructure, the financial infrastructure, the stock markets," Lewis said. "We don't have an engineering cyber-infrastructure. That's what we're trying to get to."

A national design repository would be "frequently populated, updated and put to use while simultaneously helping advance systematic and coordinated methods to access, store, search and reuse CAD models and data," Lewis added.

The grant is part of the first program at NSF to develop an engineering cyber-infrastructure, Lewis said, and, he hopes, the first of several that will enable him and team members at the other universities to "scale up the project to many other universities, add software and analysis routines and learn how to design many different types of CAD models, including solid models and 3-D virtual reality models.

"The future engineering cyber-infrastructure will not be able to be developed without corporate and further government support. I'm not a software developer. No one is really at any of the institutions involved. We will need some industrial support, and we need NASA and government agencies involved, too," Lewis said.

Big companies like GM won't want to share all their information with universities and other companies, of course, so learning how to structure the repository so that information can be kept private as well as made public will be part of the project as well.

"GM may come up with a consortium where they have their own private part of the cyber-infrastructure that they share with their suppliers, even perhaps some of their competitors if they can get a mutual benefit from it, but that would be secure from everyone else on the network," Lewis theorized. "Those are big issues that we're not going to solve in these two years (of the grant), but we are developing a proof of concept system here."

The knowledge to be gained from being part of the NSF-funded initiative can only improve the marketability of the estimated 1,700 mechanical and aerospace engineering students from the four universities who will participate in the project. As part of the grant's educational component, team members at the four universities will offer summer engineering courses to a total of 200 high school students.

"These students will be exposed to tools and technologies that are representative of those that will shape the growth of the cyber-infrastructure and currently are being used by companies in technology-intensive industries such as automotive and aerospace," Lewis said.

A UB faculty member since 1996, Lewis directs the Design of Open Engineering Systems (DOES) Research Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, which promotes and advances the state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary design optimization and modern design theory. He also is interim executive director of the New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII).

Lewis in 2001 received a Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Award from UB's undergraduate Student Association recognizing his teaching excellence and commitment to students. He also received a 2001 State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and a 2004 Society of Automotive Engineers Ralph R. Teetor Award for excellence in teaching and research.

A resident of Amherst, he earned two bachelor's degrees from Duke University and master's and doctoral degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.