An interdisciplinary senior design experience using biodiesel vehicles

An interdisciplinary team design experience has been conducted successfully for several years as part of the senior engineering laboratory effort at Western New England College. Recent modifications to the project include the adaptation of a biodiesel powered airplane engine to power a land-based vehicle. The project objectives are to introduce the students to the design process typically associated with new product development. The approach is to have student teams develop a biodiesel powered vehicle prototype which can transport payloads between two points up a sloped parking surface as quickly as possible. The effort requires the parallel development of a computerized performance prediction system, the vehicle itself, and electrical and computer systems to gather data to validate the performance prediction. The students enjoy the effort and learn a lot about real world product design and development problems including team dynamics. This paper describes the details of the design experience, discusses efforts that were found to be both successful and unsuccessful, and presents sample team prototype results.