A Wind Tunnel as a Senior/Capstone Design Project: Laboratory Enhancement and Assessment of Student Learning

Senior-level engineering students spend their final year designing and constructing challenging engineering-based capstone design projects in groups of two or more. The main objective of the senior design project is to give students first-hand knowledge of how the engineering design process works in a simulated industrial environment. Specifically, it is meant to familiarize students with the key objectives of senior design: design, construction, and testing. In addition to satisfying the learning objectives of senior design, a wind tunnel was constructed to enhance the fluid mechanics laboratory. The completion of the wind tunnel satisfied the two major goals of the project: completion of the senior design course objectives, and laboratory enhancement. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the students learning the fundamentals of design, construction, and testing, student surveys were completed and reported.