Development of CAE Course Project Focusing on Data Management and Virtual Prototyping through FEA of Windshield Wiper System Design

Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has been a core course for Junior 1 Mechanical Engineering students at Kettering University for more than a decade. This paper presents an approach to develop a new team project for the CAE course. The approach addresses Project Data Management (PDM) through an automotive windshield system design and analysis. The purpose of the course project is to learn how to manage teams and the voluminous amounts of data when working on assemblies and their related parts. Automotive windshield wiper systems are used in vehicles to remove contaminants such as rain, sleet, snow and dirt from the windshield. A typical wiper system consists of an electric motor, a linkage mechanism to transform rotational motion from the motor to oscillatory motion and a pair of wiper arms and blades. Such an assembly is representative in terms of complexity for a mechanical system and therefore ideal for this level of student as a course project. Each project team sets up a “configured project” including Roles, States, Approval Process, Library and Cataloge. Each team member is responsible for several parts design and/or analysis. The design and PDM parts of the project have been discussed by the authors in a previous work [1]. In order to meet the engineering specifications, the wiper system design must be validated for functional performance and safety. Here the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the wiper system will be used as a virtual prototyping and design tool