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Announcements
Lecture Instructor:
Scott Woodward
323 Jarvis Hall
645-1457
Office Hours:
After Class on Wednesday and Thursday by
appointment only
ScottW@buffalo.edu
Lecture TA: To be
announced
Lab Instructor:
Dr. Roger Mayne
1005 Furnas Hall
645-1424
Mayne@buffalo.edu
Office Hours: by appointment
Course Objectives:
The primary
objective of this course is to provide an
introduction to several of the topics that a mechanical or aerospace
engineer
will need to master in order to successfully design experiments and
interact with
measurement systems. In addition to an introduction to several common
physical
measurement systems and sensors (like an accelerometer or strain gage)
modern
methods of computerized data acquisition, common statistical
techniques,
experimental uncertainty analysis and guidelines for planning and
documenting
experiments will be covered. Many of the subjects covered are the
primary
subject of complete courses, books or major technical bodies of work.
This
course is designed to provide a foundation to these areas of broad
importance
to countless real-world engineering activities. The pursuit of
solutions to
questions whose answers depend on sound experimental practices (even if
they
are numerical experiments like computation fluid dynamics or finite
element
analysis) will depend heavily on this foundation. Understanding how to
interact
with, manipulate and quantify the errors associated with digital data
is
essential to designing experimental practices capable of achieving
meaningful
objectives. The ability of computers to produce overwhelming quantities
of
information places demands on the experimentalist to carefully design
experiments to acquire meaningful quality data not massive quantities
of data.
The laboratory
sessions are designed to reinforce the concepts
presented in the lectures and to give you hands-on experience in using
modern
computerized data acquisition system and instrumentation. A secondary
objective
of the course is to teach good laboratory practice, work habits and
experiment
design.
We will make
extensive use of spreadsheets for graphing
data, performing statistical calculations and general computations. If
you
are not proficient in the use of spreadsheets you are advised not
to take
MAE 334.
Textbook Information:
R.S. Figliola & D.E. Beasley, Theory
and Design for Mechanical Measurements. John Wiley and Sons, NY,
Fourth
Edition, 2006. The older 3rd
edition is acceptable.
John Wiley has a good website for the 4th edition of the
text http://www.wiley.com/college/figliola
Topics covered in the course:
- Characteristics of signals (Ch.
2)
- Behavior of measurement systems
(0th, 1st & 2nd order, Ch. 3)
- Analysis of sampled data (Ch. 4)
- Uncertainty
analysis (Ch. 5)
- Analog devices and signal
conditioning (Ch. 6)
- Sampling of analog signals (Ch.
7)
- Temperature measurements (Ch.8)
- Pressure and
Position measurements (Ch. 9 & Ch. 12)
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