A sophomore design experience: Development of a portable device for aircraft skin inspection

The Engineering clinic is an 8-semester, 24- credit course taken by all engineering students from each of the four departments in the College of Engineering at Rowan University. The main focus of the g-semester sequence is design. Each course in the design sequence is team-taught by faculty from more than one department and the student work is accomplished via multidisciplinary student project teams. This paper describes a project that was recently conducted in Sophomore Engineering Clinic II wherein students and faculty from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering embarked on a 16-week product development enterprise. In this project, students and faculty collaborated to design and develop a portable device that could be used to nondestructively inspect aircraft skin for cracks. The students were organized into two separate companies. In only 16 weeks, each company designed developed tested and manufactured a fully operational prototype. The prototypes were manufactured using stereolithography and rapid circuit prototyping along with commercial-OR-the-shelf components.