Engineering

Stage 2 Units – 25 Credit Points Each (unless stated)

Academic Communication (12.5 credit points)

This unit is specifically designed to develop key communication skills. The aims of this unit are to develop students’ understanding of, and skills in: critical reading, including note-taking, summarising and evaluating arguments; team-building and team-work skills; academic writing skills including paraphrasing, quoting and referencing; report writing; delivering oral presentations; academic writing style.

Calculus for Engineers

This unit builds on students’ knowledge of functions and calculus, further extending to a range of techniques used in solving problems arising in engineering and related fields. Students will extend their differentiation techniques to optimisation problems and the approximation of functions. This unit will cover a range of integration techniques to optimisation problems and the approximation of functions. Students will apply integration techniques to find volume, length and surface area and will be introduces to the concept of complex numbers, together with their applications and use in solutions to polynomial equations. This unit is designed for those students who have passed WACE Mathematics Methods or equivalent.

Engineering Foundations: Design and Processes

Design horizons. Effective teams. Requirements specifications; identifying features. Systems design; creative thinking methods for innovative solutions. Conceptual design. Design specifications; setting priorities. Ethics and design. Operational design; reliability, sustainability, ergonomics. maintainability. Economics of design. Social and professional responsibilities. The concept of concurrent engineering. The future; computer-aided design. Report writing within engineering academic and professional contexts. Developing reflective learning and oral communication skills.

Engineering Foundations: Principles and Communication

Structure of the engineering industry. How engineering works. Working as an engineer. Engineer’s responsibilities and duties. The engineer and the environment. Working in a team. Academic writing and ethical scholarship. Report writing within engineering academic and professional contexts. Developing reflective learning and oral communication skills. Compliance with procedures.

Engineering Mechanics

Newton’s Laws; Forces as vectors. equilibrium of concurrent and non-concurrent forces; Couples and distributed forces. Equilibrium of statistically equivalent systems; Free bodies and free- body diagrams; Analysis of simple frameworks, trusses; Internal actions within a beam using free-body diagrams; Variations in resisting forces along a beam; Relationship between load and response; Axial stress and strain, elasticity; Axial deformation; Shear stress and strain, shear modulus; Deformations in shear; Thermal effects and resulting stress and strain; Principles of compatibility; Concept of stiffness and properties of area and material that influence response; Superposition; Kinematic equations; Linear motion; Projectile motion. Curvilinear and relative motion; Plane kinetics, Newton’s second law in n-t coordinates; Linear momentum; Elastic and inelastic collisions. Work, forces and power; Potential and kinetic energy; Elastic energy; Energy conservation; Plane kinematics and kinetics of rigid bodies; Rotation about a fixed axis. Hydrostatic pressure; Static fluid forces on simple structures; Analysis of fluid; Momentum flux of all fluid flows. Bernoulli’s equation.

Engineering Programming (12.5 credit points)

The need for and importance of writing computer programs, sequencing the solution of a problem of sub-activities/instructions. Designing an algorithm. Practical programming in ‘C’ (the vocabulary, the grammar and the structure)- input-output. storage and assignment, single-path programs, logic statements. loops and arrays. Scientific and engineering libraries of routines, compilation and debugging; validation.

Electrical Systems

Fundamentals of DC Circuits; Fundamentals of AC Circuits; Electro-mechanics and Energy Conversion; Electronics; Instrumentations and Control.

Linear Algebra & Statistics for Engineers

This unit will consider the problems arising from engineering-related fields. Students will learn the necessary skills to model and solve such problems through the introduction of mathematical techniques of linear algebra, data analysis and statistical inference. This unit will cover vectors, lines and planes and their extension into n-dimension space. The unit also covers matrices and their use for solving systems of linear equations through a study of a number of different types and solution methods. Students will be introduced to the world of statistics by looking at the concepts of descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.

Resources, Processes & Materials Engineering

This unit introduces the whole-of-life cycle of resources and the underlying flow of materials, established and emerging, from their origins on to extraction, processing, selecting, applying and disposal. The unit approaches engineering decision making regarding resources as an ethical and technical systems-thinking process. A key ability that students should gain on completing this unit is to select potential materials for a given application, accounting for the suitability of their properties as well as their impact on society and the environment. Material and energy balances are introduced to quantify the resources consumed in the chemical, metallurgical, physical and biological processes associated with transforming resources and energy into end products. The origin and extraction, physical and chemical processing, sustainable use and disposal of resources are illustrated with case studies of different resources encountered across engineering disciplines, for example, metals and alloys, polymers, glasses, ceramics and composites. Foundational experiments spanning chemical processes, material properties and metallurgy support the syllabus.