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Relevant Design Experiences For Agricultural And Biosystems Engineers: Team Focus Through Competition, D. Raj Raman, Ronald E. Yoder
Relevant Design Experiences For Agricultural And Biosystems Engineers: Team Focus Through Competition, D. Raj Raman, Ronald E. Yoder
D. Raj Raman
The multitude of specializations within biosystems engineering makes traditional capstone design courses, which typically focus on a single topic, less relevant. In our department, our year-long capstone design experience involves machine component design. While this experience is useful to students in all concentrations, ideally, students concentrating on biological-, food-, and soil and water-engineering will have a capstone design experience that integrates their unique technical capabilities. New capstone courses should also enhance the broader skills of undergraduate engineers, including teamwork, time and resource management, oral and written communication, and integrated computer skills. However, a variety of issues militate against simply adding …
The Evolution Of An Introductory Biological Engineering Course: Design Is The Endpoint!, D. Raj Raman
The Evolution Of An Introductory Biological Engineering Course: Design Is The Endpoint!, D. Raj Raman
D. Raj Raman
Four the past four years, I have taught the sophomore level course, Agricultural Engineering 243 Material and Energy Flows in Biological Systems each spring semester. During the first offering, I used the lecture method to transmit information, and homework assignments and exams to reinforce skills and test comprehension. The greatest weakness of this technique seemed the lack of hands-on experience which I gave my students, and their subsequent lack of physical intuition. Enhancing their physical intuition drove the first curricular revision—using in-class demonstrations and simulations of key physical and biological processes. This technique did not work as well as expected, …
An Insect-Based Detector Of Bovine Manure Odors, D. Raj Raman, Reid R. Gerhardt
An Insect-Based Detector Of Bovine Manure Odors, D. Raj Raman, Reid R. Gerhardt
D. Raj Raman
We designed, constructed, and tested a single-stream insect odormeter for the measurement of bovine manure odors. The biosensing element in the odormeter is a group of six gravid face flies (Musca autumnalis DeGeer) in a 360 mL chamber. A microphone, mounted above the chamber, senses sounds made by the flies’ activity. The microphone signal is processed by an analog root-mean-square power-measuring circuit connected to a computer data acquisition system. The apparatus allows electronic measurement of insect activity. Initial experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this system for odor detection (yes/no). Kinetic experiments show that a dose-response curve can be produced by …