Instructor

Ramesh Singh

Section

S2

Semester

Autumn’21

Course Difficulty

As this course encompasses multiple previous courses in Mechanical Dept., it is subjective to how well you coped up with Solid Mechanics, Manufacturing Processes, KDOM, Strength of Materials, Structural Materials etc.

Time Commitment Required

4-5 hours per week.

Grading Policy and Statistics

Statistics (combined of both sections) :
AA 17
AB 21
AP 2
BB 77
BC 29
CC 11
CD 5
DD 2
FR 2
Total 166

Attendance Policy

None. Prof understands people are busy in Placements in their 7th Semester so he doesn’t mind even if 2-3 people are there in class.

Pre-requisites

All the Mech courses listed above would serve as pre-requisites to this. Courses like KDOM, Man-Pro and even KDOM lab would be useful for simulations in course project. Little knowledge of material selection would be a plus.

Evaluation Scheme

Assignments + Quizzes 20%
Midterm 10%
Project 50% (25% In-sem in form of biweekly presentations) + 25% Evaluation at the semester end of the final project)
End semester exam 20%

Topics Covered in the Course

Basics of Engineering Design
Selection of Engineering Materials for Mechanical Design
Analysis of Machine Elements
Synthesis, Design, Modeling, Fabrication and Characterization of a complete system or a
product (proposed and executed by each group of 8 or less students)

Teaching Style

Professor encourages class participation, but asks a lot of questions and wait till anyone responds. So, 30% of time there would be dead silence in class. He answers doubts in class but tends to get frustrated if you keep asking them. Numerical questions would not be covered much in lectures and most of the focus would be on revision of Mech concepts.

Tutorials/Assignments/Projects

Assignments were of moderate difficulty. Some problems were repetition of last year’s problems, others were covered in lectures only. Project forms a major portion of the course (50%) so proper time had to be spent each week. We could form team of 4-5 for the project. Generally project requires us to fabricate a product with some of our own inventions, but due to online mode we were asked to only model the product with cost analysis of fabrication. Proficiency in Software like ADAMS, ANSYS, MATLAB etc. were needed for the simulations.

Feedback on Exams

Exams were on a harder side, it required problem solving practice for all the topics covered. Questions had to be practiced from course books beforehand to perform good. One quiz was conducted of 1 hour, numerical questions were asked based on stress, strain, elastic-plastic behavior. It was basically a ME201 exam. Midsem had questions from stress tensor, failure theory and material selection. While Endsem consisted of numericals on gears, shafts, bearings etc and some theoretical questions. Stress-strain theory was covered in depth in all of the exams.

Course Highlights

Project was really the only new experience out of this course. Practically applying all the concepts learned throughout your Mech curriculum was quite fascinating. Creative freedom and proper weightage was given to it so we have motivation to spend time on this. Some classes were also cancelled and HWs were not kept graded so we could focus on our projects. In each meet, prof gave each and every team useful tips to move ahead with our projects. You should really take this opportunity and give special attention to the project as there is no learning without any real product to show.

Course Importance

This is mostly a culmination of your Mechanical journey, so there is no future importance in any core course. Though it can help in some electives like ME 669 which also deals with material selection process. If you are interested in going for higher studies than also this course would help you to gauge your basic understanding in important Mechanic concepts. Still, it doesn’t cover Fluid and Thermo which also are very crucial mechanical courses.

References Used

Materials Selection in Mechanical Design by Michael F. Ashby
Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design 9th Edition (Some questions directly came from this book in exams)

Interesting relevant links

Complete course videos from same Prof is accessible on his YouTube Channel (Lecture recordings of his 2020 class) : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHfxjH8y7W_Ax3L0yJq5iTqT2Hjnet9gi

Review By: Prayas Jain