Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 1 | Page 18

STORY AND PHOTOS BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Heat flux sensor provides undergraduates with portable lab experience

Top - The entire kit fits in a case about twice the size of a deck of cards .
Above - Associate Professor Al Wicks worked with Professor Tom Diller to create the kit and adapt its inclusion into undergraduate course work this semester .
Giving students excellent hands-on learning experiences doesn ’ t necessarily mean laboratories filled with the latest high-tech hardware . Starting with the Spring 2017 semester , some mechanical engineering undergraduates are carrying their labs in their backpacks thanks to the work of two faculty members who turned a grant-inspired innovation into a unique learning tool for students .
In 2015 , two graduate students working with Professor Tom Diller on a National Science Foundation project for hands-on learning , formulated a method to manufacture heat flux sensors far more inexpensively than those being sold at the time . The students and Diller went on to form the company FluxTeq to commercialize the technology . The company is currently located in a lab at the Corporate Research Center . This spring Diller has started to use these products in his classes as part of a portable lab with the assistance of Associate Professor Al Wicks .
“ We ’ ve been working for the last couple years on a way to provide students with more hands-on experiences ,” Wicks explained . “ The concept is to allow students to have the capability of doing lab-type exercises without having a formal lab section .”
With more than 400 undergraduates in current classes of mechanical engineering , there aren ’ t enough 3-hour sections to handle the lab requirements such a student load would bring – to say nothing of faculty and graduate assistant staff to make it feasible . According to Wicks , heat flux-related labs haven ’ t been part of the curriculum course requirements for nearly two decades .
The portable lab kit , which is only slightly larger than a deck of playing cards , allows students to do heat flux measurements , and provides a much more well-rounded educational experience for the students .
“ We literally built a data acquisition system based on a micro-controller attached to a heat flux gauge ,” said Wicks . “ There is a USB cable which can be plugged into a students ’ laptop and they can use this small , inexpensive system to make measurements . They are using state of the
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