In our final-year capstone design course, our fourth-year students work directly with clients in industry to help solve practical engineering problems. We are always looking for industry partners with design projects we can match with our students.
Our industry partners have the unique opportunity to receive the output of 160 hours of work per student – 80 in the design stage and 80 in the prototyping stage. With teams of four or five students, this adds up to between 320-800 hours of work on each completed project.
By participating in this design course, you will have the opportunity to work with one of our faculty members and engage with students who could be potential new hires in your industry.
The ideal capstone design project is a challenging design problem related to a real industrial application that is likely to be implemented. Projects do not need to be pure mechanical design - they can include analysis, process development etc. There is plenty of scope to include any project that provides a practical engineering challenge to the student team. Preferably, the client representative should be an engineer. The project should not be on the critical path to any time-sensitive client goals. There is always the risk that student designs may not meet deadlines, or the solution may not be feasible to implement.
The client is expected to provide a cash amount of $1,500 to support the program, cover material and machine shop costs, and provide in-kind support, including:
Projects only proceed in the winter semester with the approval of the client, the student team, and the course instructional team. The client commitment includes continued staff time plus any additional resources necessary to complete the project. These include materials, machine shop expenses, equipment purchases/rentals, etc. A budget for these costs will be established before any work begins.
The course coordinator will aim to find you a suitable student team to match up with your project, although there may be more projects than teams available.
Our course instructor meets with the students every two weeks to monitor progress and give project management guidance. Our instructor evaluates their work from both a communications and management perspective and offers feedback to encourage innovative solutions.
Each project is assigned a faculty advisor who will meet regularly with the students to give specific technical guidance and monitor progress. The advisor will evaluate their work from both a technical and communications perspective and provide feedback to encourage improvements to the designs.
The students will spend 8-12 hours on the project in a typical week over ten weeks in both the fall and winter terms. They will consult with the client, usually by email or conference call, regularly throughout the term.
Students will provide the client with:
Each project requires a description so we can match student teams with projects. These descriptions are posted on the course web page for students to review, so they should not contain any proprietary information. In the first week of classes, students submit a letter of intent applying to the projects they would prefer to work on.
The annual nature of the program means we need to get descriptions ready for review by the students before they start classes in early September. Ideally, discussions about project ideas should happen in June/July.
If you have an idea for a project, or questions on how to get involved, please contact us to discuss the next steps at mme.capstone@queensu.ca