Abstract:

University system, due to being involved in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), requires an increment of the simulation work associated to its subjects. The objective of this fact is that students could obtain more practical knowledges, which are required by the labor market. This requirement is even more related with subjects included in the education on Mechanical Engineering issues. This is the main objective of this work, to provide the Machine Design subject with more practical work, from the point of view of a Finite Element Method (FEM) modelling, as a support to the classroom exercises that are examples of the given theoretical concepts. Machine Design subject is located in the third course of the Mechanical Engineering Grade in the Industrial Engineering School (EII) of the University of Valladolid (UVa).

The objective of this work has been the FEM simulation of the static performance of the pieces of a mechanism that has been studied on the classroom exercises. These simulations complement the exercises and make the understanding of the mechanical element behavior easier to the students. The static performance simulations allow the students to locate more clearly the critical section of the element. On this section, the failure criterion is applied, in order to analyze the most unfavorable, working with a margin of safety. Besides, using simulation programs will encourage apprentice capacity and motivation in students. This work tries to make easier the understanding of how the failure prediction of the piece is carried out for students.

The work team is formed by professors, students and former students of the subject. The last ones develop their Bachelor thesis as part of this project. They carry out the simulations, providing their point of view of them, allowing a better understanding of the difficulties that the students find and being able to solve them. Besides, as part of their Bachelor thesis, this work allows them to go into detail about an issue, to improve the search of the references about that certain technical issue, to analyze similar works, and to be able to provide changes on them, to write and to show results, and it helps them to develop a more critical spirit in order to distinguish between important and secondary issues.

This contribution is complemented with an assessment of the simulations carried out by the current students of the subject. They evaluate how much the simulations have been useful to face up the subject. This evaluation has allowed the work team to validate the efficiency of this project and to improve it. Students generating part of the subject content are more autonomous in their apprentice process, and they have higher technical self-belief because they are able to create specific models.

Finally, as in the Machine Technology subject of the Industrial Engineering Master, provided on the EII of the UVa, machine design concepts are studied, the generated simulations of this work are also considered useful as helping material for this subject. More work could be done to fit the generated simulations to this new subject.

Keywords:

Simulation work, Machine Design, learning support, student-collaborative.