A Rankine Cycle Design Project for Assessment of ABET Student Outcome #1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper introduces a Rankine Cycle design project developed for assessment of ABET Student Outcome #1. This instrument was first implemented within an Applied Thermodynamics course, which enrolls 3rd and 4th year Mechanical Engineering students, and is the second class in a thermodynamics sequence at St. Ambrose University. In this course, students learn to program within the Interactive Thermodynamics environment, which is a simple and elegant software package developed to solve classical thermodynamics problems. One advantage of the software is that it can quickly and efficiently analyze complex thermodynamics processes, systems, and cycles. Generally, these same problems are very time-consuming when analyzed "by hand" due to the extensive use of look-up tables and manual interpolation schemes. Moreover, the software can easily perform parametric studies, which allows students to vary system conditions, reveal important relationships among the operating parameters, and gain valuable insight into the overall system behavior. This project requires students to design the layout and thermodynamic conditions of a power plant operating on a Rankine Cycle within the provided set of constraints. Students may choose to use reheat and regeneration processes within their designs to improve cycle performance but must choose components from a defined catalog of options. Each component has an associated cost, environmental impact score, and if necessary, isentropic efficiency. Ultimately, each submitted design receives a score based on its ability to maximize the thermal efficiency and net work produced while minimizing cost and environmental impact. The project compels students to develop multiple designs, use engineering judgement to evaluate tradeoffs, and attempt to optimize the four scoring parameters simultaneously. A portion of each student's project grade results from the relative overall score of his or her design versus all others submitted within the class. This direct link between design and final grade serves to encourage competition, discourage unapproved collaboration, and replicate product development conditions in industry in which a competitor's approach is often not known. In addition to a schematic and diagram of the final cycle layout and operating conditions, students also must submit a short report justifying their final design by explaining how they identified, formulated, and solved this complex engineering problem. This report served as an instrument with which to assess ABET Student Outcome #1 directly. This paper details the constraints of the problem, the approach students took to solve it, and the lessons learned from implementing it as an assessment instrument.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".