A mobile laboratory as a venue for education and outreach emphasizing sustainable transportation

Abstract

Educators at Michigan Tech have developed a versatile mobile laboratory that will travel the North American continent serving as a venue for a wide range of educational opportunities including support of curriculum based courses, targeted short courses. community education and outreach. The lab was built as part of a US Department of Energy funded program to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Engineering that includes certificates at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The authors have found hands-on discovery based learning activities to be an effective means of enabling students to grasp and retain complex topics in engineering and science, and furthermore, that engineering students excel when they can relate an individual concept to the overall larger context of product development and societal advancement. With an emphasis on sustainable transportation systems the mobile lab provides opportunities for hands-on discovery based learning throughout the development process from model based simulation and design to optimization of hardware and controls. The mobile lab consists of several elements. The primary laboratory tructure is a 16.2 m long van trailer that incorporates an expandable center section for a total of 65 m2 of space. The expandable center section provides for instruction based learning and bench-top activities on four universal and configurable lab benches. The front and rear of the trailer contain test cells that can be operated from the lab benches in a number of modes including a steady state mode to study the operation of specific components and as a dynamic system with real-time Hardware-In-The-Loop functionality. The powertrain in the test cells is a match to the powertrain in a configurable Hybrid Electric Vehicle. The configurable Hybrid Electric Vehicle allows students to change many elements of the vehicle including hardware, embedded software and optimized parameter sets. Three production hybrid vehicles are provided to study the operation of production vehicles in real-world driving scenarios. In addition to driving on the road, these production vehicles, as well as the configurable hybrid vehicle can be tested on the mobile lab's single role chassis dynamometer enabling the students to emulate specific drive cycles. The experimental apparatus and activities on the mobile lab are scalable and configurable. This enables educators to tailor the learning experience to many demographics including K-12, college, and the community. Likewise the contact period with the participants can be as short as just a few minutes as in the case of some outreach events, a few days as in the case of some short courses, or a full semester in support of "for credit" curriculum based courses. This paper provides technical details on the development and capabilities of the mobile lab and describes the pedagogy behind the educational activities that are conducted with the mobile lab. The outcomes of select activities are discussed as are ways in which participant assessments are guiding continued development. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.