Undergraduate Class Project: Design and Build a Helical Coil Heat Exchanger Experiment

At Saint Martin’s University, the Mechanical Engineering Department incorporates design throughout the curriculum, starting from the freshman course ‘Introduction to Engineering’ up through the senior capstone design. Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering students are required to take three Mechanical Engineering elective courses. Each of these elective courses is 3 credits; one of these credits must be design. For ME 436 Thermal Design of Heat Exchangers course, the students were assigned a project to meet the Accrediting Board of Engineering and Technology student outcome criteria a, b, c, d, e, g, and i. In addition to course work the students designed, market searched for parts, budgeted, manufactured and built, then tested a finned helical coil heat exchanger experiment. A limited budget was assigned for this project. Currently, the apparatus is being used as an additional experiment in the Thermal Engineering Laboratory. This article includes the preliminary design, final design, experimental results, and assessment by students and faculty.