General requirements

1. Projects will be completed by groups of two or three students. Groups of one are not permitted. Each group will submit one copy of the project report. Although a list of potential projects is provided, you may create a project of your own instead. The projects below are mostly based on material from the book. Alternate projects may be computational, theoretical, or experimental, but are subject to approval by Dr. Pogo.
2. You may choose your own groups. You must notify Dr. Pogo of your group membership by Friday, March 27, 2009. Any student not in a group by that date will be assigned to a group of two by Dr. Pogo, without your consent.
3. Projects are due on Wednesday, May 6, 2009. Hardcopies are required. Accompanying electronic work may be submitted to my inbox.
4. Each project report should be professional and self-contained. The following should be included in each report:

A dated cover page, indicating all team members. This cover page should include a one paragraph abstract.
An explanation of the problem that you are trying to solve. Remember that this report is to be self-contained. Do not refer to “the figure on the handout”, or “according to the book”, or other similar references.
A discussion of the analysis methods. This should include a discussion of any assumptions that you make, including a justification for each assumption. That is, you may not merely state your assumptions, but you

must discuss the extent to which each assumption is true, and the conditions required for each assumption to be considered valid. For example, the surface of a lake is NEVER flat, due to a combination of variable winds and surface tension, and the curvature and rotation of the earth. However, we commonly neglect all these effects when computing pressure at the lake bottom, because they do not significantly change the result. But, these assumptions might not be valid during a storm. To demonstrate whether something can be neglected, you must estimate numeric values for those things, and explain why these values are insignificant. Again: justifications must include both words and computations.

As another example, we commonly neglect variations in water density when making computations. However, if the problem involves sound waves, then the small variations in density are the most important factor in computing the wave speed.
Any pictures, diagrams, tables, etc., that are necessary to communicate the problem, the solution, or your intermediate results. All figures should be textbook quality. MathCAD printouts are usually not of presentation quality.
A discussion of your results. This will differ for each project, and may include issues of cost, manufacturability, efficiency, ease of use, limitations on use, maintenance, environmental impact, and/or other items.

5. Text portions of the project must be typed. Symbolic calculations may be written by hand if you desire. “Calculator notation” (3* x^2, or 3E-7) is, as always, unacceptable for use in reports.
6. Grading will be a function of project difficulty and the number of students in the project. Easier projects will be more strictly graded, as will projects undertaken by groups of three students. For each suggested project, I have tried to include an estimate of the project difficulty, on a scale from 1 to 10.
7. You may not write in the imperative (like a lab manual). Also, your tense may be either past or present, but not future. If you have a figure, or table, etc., you will refer to it in your text somewhere. Also, the figure will have a name (e.g., “Figure 3”). See any textbook for examples of these rules.
8. Some of the projects will require some “library” work on your part. Every project has some ambiguities, and every project requires some knowledge of material that has not yet been, and may not ever be, covered in class.
9. Comments on plots generated with Excel:

If you have a title, it should be more than “y axis vs. x axis”, or “V vs t”, or “Speed vs. time”. These are not very helpful. The title should indicate what is important about the plot. The title should use words to describe what these things are. See the caption of any plot in the text for an example (e.g., see figure 6.4, page 347).
Don’t use zillions of trailing zeroes in your axis values. For example, a time axis should not go from “0.0000” to “100.0000”, etc. Use “100”, or at most, “100.0”, for the axis labels.
Be careful with capitalization. As you know, most symbols change meaning when capitalized.
Axis values should have a range that has significance to the problem. Both the minimum and maximum values plotted should be relevant (e.g., not –¥ to ¥). Don’t accept anything that Excel does for you without checking to see if it is what you really want. Trendlines, if used, will almost certainly require variables other than “y” and “x”. Also, trendline slopes (etc.) have units, even though Excel doesn’t tell you what they are.
Along these lines, Excel adds a stupid little box (“series 1”) onto the right hand side of all plots. Unless you are showing more than one set of data on a plot, this box should be deleted.
Experimental data points are rarely connected by lines. Computed results often are. Make sure you know the difference between these two.
Axis labels should indicate units.