As part of Drexel's undergraduate engineering curriculum, all students are exposed to design in their first year in a course called Engineering 101, or Freshman Design. The course begins with a set of design "modules." These diverse modules range from building and testing a multifunctional K'NEX car, building and using a Lego model [PDF] of an atomic force microscope, optimizing heat transfer within a model solar home, to programming a Roomba robot vacuum to navigate its way out of a maze. The entire freshman engineering class is divided into groups of 15 to 25 students who meet weekly with a faculty member.
The capstone event of Freshman Design is the presentation of a project that the students devise early in the course and develop over the following 30 weeks with their professor. Here we feature Assistant Professor Bradley Layton, of the Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department and his group of 17 freshman engineers who decided to tackle the multifaceted problems associated with automobile traffic in urban environments.
Together they designed, modeled and conducted field tests on a "bicycle highway." The purpose of this ongoing project is to address the following: 1) To enhance human health by providing commuters with a safe alternative to automobile commuting, a major contributor to obesity; 2) To reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with automobile exhaust; 3) To improve air and water quality in urban environments by diminishing particulate and fluid emissions from automobiles; 4) and to positively impact national security by diminishing the dependency on imported fossil fuels.
Over the 30-week course, the students worked in four teams. One team, consisting of Lauren Jablonowski, Brandon Lassor and Jamie Kennedy, wrote and launched a survey to determine the likelihood that people would use such a structure if it were to be built. Their survey showed that a majority would use such a structure and most would forfeit their gym memberships and pay a small fee to use the structure. Another team, consisting of Lucas Hippel, Ryan Kirby, Thaddeus Kumor, and Nicholas Lampe, designed the civil engineering aspects of the structure, selected materials for the transparent cover and road surface. Their economic analysis determined that the structure, if it were to be used with at least 50% capacity, would be several times more cost-effective than existing automobile roadway of similar scale. A third team, comprised of Scott Holden, Joseph Ibay, Jason Kidd and Daniel Lang, studied wind and surface drag coefficients as well as optimal riding speeds and configurations to move the greatest number of people through the structure in the safest manner possible. Finally, a human physiology team consisting of Sean Hannon, Andrew Jarvis, David Korth and Mary Kain analyzed the amount of power generated by an average human (100-200 Watts) and compared this to an automobile about (5,000-20,000 Watts) and discovered that humans are indeed anywhere from 25 to 200 times more efficient than cars and emit one-fifth of the CO2 per mile than a car.
A summary of the students' findings will be published this fall at the American Society of Mechanical Engineering Meeting in Seattle Washington by Professor Layton. Dr. Layton holds a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. While his primary research interest is nanoscale biomechanics, he has been a life-long fan of his undergraduate thesis advisor, David Gordon Wilson, who as an octogenarian is still an avid cyclist and proponent for environmentally responsible engineering.