Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area puts especial emphasis on inspiring in the student the capability of further studying and learning instead of information based learning.
Engineering education needs the University student to be proficient in both the concepts and their applications in professional environments.
This poses challenges to engineers’ curricula so that a more limited time is available for explaining the students the basics of many processes and systems essential to industry and for that essential in their education.
The design process is of paramount importance to engineers in a globalized and advanced society if it wants to add high value to the products.
Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a methodology applicable to higher education of engineers and frequently it is implemented in a straightforward way on Open Ended Problems (OEP).
With this tool the student is challenged to perform the basics of a design, making decisions based on one hand on previous experience and on the other hand on basic equations of the working of the system under study.
The classical way of doing this is to do a sequential calculation on paper using calculation aids (even including short computer programs). But this allows only a few iterations, thus limiting the optimization phase.
A new way of implementing this tool is using calculation languages that offer not only a set of tools facilitating the student to implement his design, but also facilitating the teacher evaluating the effort and results of the students and finally facilitating proposing improvements to the design for the student as a feed-back process.
This methodology needs the development of some basic tools specific to the subject. An example in Turbomachine design will be offered so that the process will be illustrated. This example has been developed by a student as a final master thesis.
Mathcad© will be used as working platforms as it depicts equations as in a paper and offers many facilities for teaching. At the same time it is s widespread professional platform in engineering.

Keywords:

Problem Based learnig, Open End Problems, Engineering higher education, teaching innovation, thermal machines, turbomachines.