Project Overview

Project Overview

In this course, students are given the choice to choose their freshman design project based on major, interests, and deliverables. This section is focused on Materials Science and Engineering and this specific project is themed in Materials Education and Outreach. The objective is to create a highly visual yet low cost demonstration of a single material property; our group has chosen thermal expansion. The demonstration should be easy to understand, geared toward visual learners, and should visually demonstrate the difference in degrees of thermal expansion in different materials. Expected technical challenges involving the reparation of the project are: forming an idea for the demonstrations and model, acquiring the materials for the demonstration, and successfully simulating thermal expansion. The major tasks at hand are making and planning demonstrations that can quickly show thermal expansion and making a simple model that explains the phenomenon of thermal expansion at an atomic scale. Our group plans to use a brass ball and stick model to show thermal expansion in metals, a water bottle and a pipette to show the expansion of water, and constructing a model of a metal atom from springs and Styrofoam balls. The final deliverables of this project are three demonstrations of thermal expansion and an atomic-level model.