Welcome to the website of the laboratory courses, serving MAE171a, MAE175a and MAE126a. The aim of the laboratory oriented courses is to analyze experiments in the area of mechanical engineering (MAE171a), aerospace engineering (MAE175a) and environmental engineering (MAE126a). The experiments in this laboratory course are tailored towards a specific engineering discipline and include fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, vibration analysis, control of 2DOF mechanical and aerospace systems, linear circuits, heat transfer, thermal plume, photovoltaic and atmospheric turbulence experiments. For the fluid and solid mechanics experiments large facilities such as a wind tunnel, a water channel and a load frame testing machine are used to analyze the behavior of both fluid and solid mechanical systems. The vibration and control experiments are configured around the modeling and experimental verification of the vibrations of a flexible structure, the high-speed and high-accuracy position control of a flexible lumped-mass mechanical system, a moment gyroscope and a small scale helicopter model. The heat transfer, thermal plume, photovoltaic and atmospheric turbulence experiments involve high precision temperature and density measurements in laboratory scale facilities tailored towards environmental engineering aspects.

During the laboratory hours, 3 out of 11 of the following different experiments must be completed:

In order to enroll in the MAE laboratory courses one needs a grade of C– or better in MAE101C or CENG103C or CENG101C; MAE160, MAE140, MAE143B, MAE170 and senior standing in engineering major. In general, no exceptions can be made to the listing of these prerequisites, as the basic background knowledge of these courses is required to complete the laboratory experiments safely and succesfully.

The course consists of lectures and laboratory work. Lectures will start during the 1st week of the quarter and are given in CSB 001 (for MAE126a students), PCYNH 106 (for MAE171a students) and CENTR 212 (for MAE175a students) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 5:00pm to 6:50pm. The laboratory work will start during the 2nd week of the quarter takes place in the UnderGraduate Laboratory (UGL) located at Room 107, EBUII and in the UnderGraduate Control Laboratory (UGCL) at Room 121, EBUII.

Students form groups of 4 people that coordinate the work to be done for each specific experiment. Groups of 4 are created during the 1st lecture on Monday January 6, 2014. Each experiment needs to be completed within 3 weeks and the results should be documented in a written laboratory report. Which 3 experiments you need to do, depends on your group number assignment that will be assigned during the 1st week of the quarter after you have signed up in a group of 4 students.

The lectures are used to explain the laboratory work to be done and the different experiments that have to be addressed. Additionally lectures are given that cover the topics of laboratory report writing, statistics and error analysis and engineering ethics. The course material consists of Laboratory and Lecture Notes available via this webpage. Office hours are during laboratory hours and by appointment.

The course staff consists of Course Instructors, Tutors and Laboratory staff. The Course Instructors for Winter 2013 are Prof. R.A. de Callafon (for MAE175a), Prof. J. Kleissl (for MAE126a), Prof. V. Nesterenko and Prof. K. Seshadri (both for MAE171a) and they can be contacted as follows:

• MAE175a: Prof. de Callafon, tel. (858) 534-3166, email: callafon@ucsd.edu.
• MAE126a: Prof. Kleissl, tel. (858) 534-8087, email: jkleissl@ucsd.edu.
  
• MAE171a: Prof. Nesterenko,  tel. (858) 822-0289, email: vnesterenko@ucsd.edu.
  
• MAE171a: Prof. Seshadri, tel. (858) 534-4876, email: kseshadri@ucsd.edu.

The laboratory staff consists of

• UnderGraduate Control Laboratory (UGCL): Chris Cassidy, tel. (858) 534-1470, email: ccassidy@ucsd.edu
• UnderGraduate Laboratory (UGL):  Steve Roberts, tel. (858)  534-2421, email: steveroberts@ucsd.edu.
• Environmental Engineering Laboratory: Steve Roberts, tel. (858)  534-2421, email: steveroberts@ucsd.edu.

For most of the experiments, Tutors or Teaching Assistants (TA's) are available for additional help and guidance during the laboratory hours. The information on the TA's will be updated on this website as soon as this is available:

• Material Testing and Linear Circuit experiment: Sophia Wang, email: s9wang@ucsd.edu and Yichao Xu, email: yix004@ucsd.edu.
• Wind Tunnel experiment: Ryan Searcy, email: rsearcy@ucsd.edu.
  
• Water Channel and Heat Plume experiment: Chi Wai Chow, cwchow@ucsd.edu.
  
• Position Control, Vibration Analysis and Gyroscope Control experiment: Gilbert Collins, email: gwcollin@ucsd.edu and Jeff Narkis, email:  jnarkis@ucsd.edu.
• Atmospheric Turbulence and PhotoVoltaic experiment: Felipe Mejia, email: famejia@eng.ucsd.edu.
• Heat Transfer experiment: Rahul Kapadia, email: rahul@ucsd.edu.
  

Objectives
Some of the lectures given in this course are specifically designed to assist students in acquiring the technical writing skills necessary to develop a clearly written, coherent laboratory research report.  Instruction will focus on the rhetorical structure and linguistic features of laboratory research reports.  Using the tool of text analysis, students will learn to analyze the features (content, organization, language and format) of the genre and apply this knowledge to the writing of the laboratory reports. Please check the lecture schedule below for the exact time and location of the writing lectures.

Course Texts
Writing handouts are available on this website. Students are expected to print out and read handouts for relevant lectures and tutorials prior to class.  Please bring handouts to lectures for your convenience.

Objectives
During the laboratory work of this class, experimental data is gathered to verify specific phenomena from an experimental point of view. These phenomena may include fluid, flow or material properties and dynamic or vibration parameters. To analyse the consistency and reliability of the data, some basic statistic analysis is mandatory during the experiments and the analysis of the results in the laboratory reports. In addition, propagation and sources of errors during the experiments has to be analyzed to predict the behavior of the error made during the experiments on the final modeling and validation results.

For this purpose, a lecture is given that reviews the basic sources of errors in indirect measurements during the laboratory experiments. Please check the lecture schedule below for the exact time and location of the statistics and error analysis lecture. Basic statistical analysis based on Normal and t-distributions will be reviewed to enable the construction of confidence intervals for your measurements.

Course Texts
The lecture notes for the statistics and error analysis is available in the form of a handout. Students are expected to print out and read the handout before the error analysis lectures prior to class. Please bring handouts to lectures for your convenience.

As part of this course course, three lectures on engineering ethics will be given. To complete this laboratory course succesfully, please note the following with respect to the ethics lectures:

• Attendance during these lectures is mandatory. Attendance during the ethics lectures will be verified and an updated list of students that attended the ethics lectures will be posted on this website.
  
• You are also required to fill out the Ethics Lecture Handout and will be part of your grading.

Remember: without the ethics lectures or without filling out the ethics lecture handout you will receive an incomplete grade. An attendance list will be maintained to see if you have missed any of the ethics lectures. If you did miss one of the ethics lectures, make-up ethics lectures (reshowing of ethics videos + taking attendance) must be done during Finals Week. 

Reports
The grading is done on the basis of three written laboratory reports, the ethics handout and a final examination. Since you will be receiving feedback on your laboratory reports, the grade for the reports will be weighted heavier towards the last report.The laboratory work will be done in groups of 4 students. Therefore, only one laboratory report per group per experiment needs to be handed in. The ethics handout and the final examination, however, is graded individually. The total grade will be determined as follows:

1. First report: 15%
2. Second report: 20%
3. Third report: 25%
4. Ethics Handout: 5%
   
5. Final examination: 35%

Every laboratory report completes the work on one specific experiments and your report is due with the TA of your experiment at 3pm one day before you start your new laboratory experiment. E.g., if you did your lab experiment on Wednesday (morning or afternoon), your lab report will be due at 3pm on Tuesday the following week. In case your report due date falls on a Monday holiday (M.L. King Jr. or Presidents), your report will be due on the following Tuesday during the start of your regular lab section.

A hard copy of the reports should be handed in with the TA of your experiment as listed under Course Instructors, Tutors or Laboratory staff. A soft copy of your report (in the form of a PDF file) must be emailed to your TA of yoru experiment as listed under Course Instructors, Tutors or Laboratory staff. Reports accepted after the assigned time will receive a significant reduction in grade!

The reports have the following size limitation:

• Use double space text with font size 12pt or larger
• Page limit (including figures) of 20 pages, excluding sections on raw data and appendices.  Any excess number of pages will lead to a reduction in the report grade.
  

The final examination will be a closed book and closed notes written exam held during finals week. The final exam is held on Monday March 17 from 7pm till 10pm in PCYNH 106 for MAE171A student, Monday March 17 from 7pm till 10pm in CENTER 212 for MAE175A students and on Friday March 21 from 3pm to 6pm in CSB001 for MAE126A students. 

1. Theoretical background and laboratory work, based on the lecture notes and laboratory handouts, associated to the 3 experiments in which you participated during the labcourse.
2. Error analysis and statistics as covered by the Statistics and Error Analysis lectures notes, including the identification of error sources in your experiment, statistical analysis and error propagation.

For the laboratory work of the course, you will have to work in a group of 4 (sometimes 5) students in the UnderGraduate Laboratory (UGL), Room 107, EBUII, or the UnderGraduate Control Laboratory (UGCL), Room 121, EBUII. Each group has to complete 3 out of the available laboratory experiments. Which 3 out of the available experiments you need to do, depends on your group number assignment. The experimental work for each experiment must be completed during 3 laboratory sections over the span of 3 weeks and the following time schedule will be followed:

• 01/14/14 - 01/31/14 - Laboratory Sections for First Laboratory Experiment & Laboratory Safety Training
  
• 02/04/14 - 02/21/14 - Laboratory Sections for Second Laboratory Experiment
• 02/25/14 - 03/14/14 - Laboratory Sections for Third Laboratory Experiment

Before you come to the lab

Due Dates for Report Writing

Every laboratory report completes the work on one specific experiments and is a hard copy is due at 3pm with the TA of your experiment one day before you start your new laboratory experiment. You also need to send a softcopy in the form of a PDF file to your TA of your experiment. E.g., if you did your lab experiment on Wednesday (morning or afternoon), your lab report will be due at 3pm on Tuesday the following week. In case your report due date falls on a Monday holiday (M.L. King Jr. or Presidents), your report will be due on the following Tuesday during the start of your regular lab section. Reports should be handed in to the TA as listed under Course Instructors, Tutors or Laboratory staff. Reports accepted after the assigned time will receive a significant reduction in grade!

The laboratory sections do not start until the second week of the course. During the first lecture students have to organized themselves in groups of 4 within the specific Laboratory Section you signed up for. For completing the laboratory work, the following 8 Laboratory Sections (morning and afternoon) are available (there are no labs on Mondays):

1. Tuesday AM session - Tuesday 9:00am till 11:50am
   
2. Tuesday PM session - Tuesday 12:30pm till 3:20pm
   
3. Wednesday AM session - Wednesday 9:00am till 11:50am
   
4. Wednesday PM session - Wednesday 1:00 pm till 3:50pm
   
5. Thursday AM session - Thursday 9:00am - 11:50am
   
6. Thursday PM session - Thursday 12:30 pm till 3:20pm
7. Friday AM session - Friday 9:00 am till 11:50am
8. Friday PM session - Friday 1:00pm till 3:50pm

During the first lecture, students will be organized in groups of 3-4 (more than 4 students/group is not recommended) within the specific Laboratory Section they have signed up for. Please follow the link to the Laboratory Schedule and Group Number Assignment (PDF) to see in what group you will be working. In order to check your group number, you'll need Adobe Acrobat reader. You can use CTRL-F (or any search function of your Acrobat PDF viewer) to find your name in the listing of the Laboratory Schedule and Group Number Assignment. A hard copy of the Laboratory Schedule and Group Number Assignment will also be posted on the bulletin board in UnderGraduate Control Laboratory (UGCL), Room 121, EBUII. Before emailing the course instructors with questions on the Laboratory schedule and group number assignment, please see answers to the following questions below.

The laboratory work and the report writing must be done by the group of students. Each group is assigned a Group Number and depending on your Group Number and whether you are a Mechanical (MAE171A) or a Aerospace (MAE175A) Engineering or a Environmental (MAE126a) Engineering student, the following sequence of (max. 3) experiments (for abbreviations of experiments see top of page) will have to completed during the last 9 weeks of this course:

Experiments and Group number for Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science Students (MAE171A)

Experiments and Group number for Aerospace Engineering Students (MAE175A)

Experiments and Group number for Environmental Engineering Students (MAE126A)

What if your name is NOT on the Laboratory Schedule and Group Number Assignment?

Please refresh your browser to upload the lastest version of this webpage. For the different experiments conducted during the labcourse, lecture notes will be made available here. The lecture notes will provide background information on your experiment and note that the contents of the lecture notes of a particular experiment is part of the final exam in case you were assigned to perform this experiment with your group. The lecture notes on Statistics and Error Analysis is part of the final exam for everyone taking the MAE171a, MAE175a, MAE126a laboratory course. The links to the lecture notes will be updated regularly as soon as the lecture notes become available.

• Summary of required format and key elements of your report.
• More detailed notes/worksheets on important report sections: Introduction, Experimental Procedure, Results and Discussion.
  
• Examples of reports from the American Journal of Physics: example 1, example 2 and example 3.
  

Maintained by Prof. R.A. de Callafon, last revision: 10:13 AM 03/12/2014 Department of MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) at UCSD