Elizabeth Dreher, Senior in BMES, Concentration in Biomaterials and
Tissue Engineering, reflects on her experiences as she learned that there many more resources available from our Library’s web site to help her find information for her engineering design project.

In her own words:

“RE: BMES Senior Design Project

Prior to consulting with Jay Bhatt, I mainly used Science Direct to find peer reviewed papers. To a lesser extent, I also used PubMed and Google coupled with Drexel library’s SFX to access the papers that were not free through the PubMed or Google searches. To find more general information for assignments, I have used MD Consult and restricted my search results to text books. In the event that I couldn’t find a paper or general information, I have used ‘DrexelLibraryRef’ on AIM.

After my consultation with Jay Bhatt, I found many additional resources helpful to my senior design project. For my group’s Senior Design Proposal, I was interested in finding statistical information regarding hospitalization times and costs associated with intervertebral disc injuries. I had a hard time finding statistics on this subject until Jay introduced me to LexisNexis Statistical, which provided many relevant tables of costs for hospitalization injuries. I was also looking for detailed information on how part of our design would impact the environment and people involved in manufacturing. Our group is working with a vinyl monomer for which detailed environmental information wasn’t available on ScienceDirect or the other resources I knew. Jay Bhatt recommended I use the resources on the Senior Design blog for Chemical Engineering. From these resources, I was able to find toxicity and other relevant information from Ullmann’s and Knovel, which led me to Sittig’s Handbook of Toxic and Hazardous Chemicals and Carcinogens. In summary, I found everything I was looking for in less than an hour with the Jay’s help, and now I am more equipped to handle finding a variety of data for my BMES Senior Design project and other assignments.”

-Elizabeth Dreher, Senior in BMES, Concentration in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering

CoE held its 2009 Senior Design Competition June 3, 2009 in the Mitchell Auditorium. All graduating CoE students are required to complete a Senior Design project, teaching students the engineering design process from conception to production. Eight teams competed for first place but Dr. Steven Weber’s team took the grand prize with their ‘schdulr’ system.

1ST PLACE TEAM
Project Representing Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Comprehensive Web-Based Course Management and Scheduling System
The ECE team designed an application called ‘schdulr’, which is a web-based course scheduling application that provides students with a unified interface to plan out their course of study at college and register for classes.

The team consisted of Abhishek Bhardwaj, Anisha Shrestha and George Benny Varghese.

Team’s reflection on resources that they found useful:

“Our senior design project is an application called “schdulr”. It is a web based course management and scheduling system. We used the Ruby and Ruby on Rails framework to build our application. We used the physical library resources extensively as a programming reference for Ruby and to learn about optimization theory. The online resources such as Books24X7 and Safari offered us the convenience to access the information from anywhere. This allowed us to significantly reduce the development time and helped us create an award winning project.”

Congratulations Team!

The senior design team of Eric Eisele, Courtney Reid, Dan Pugh, Sarah Byrnes, and Charlie Woods was awarded a Phase II People, Prosperity, and Planet Award from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  See Senior Design Team wins EPA funding for more details.

Eric and his team used several Library resources over a period of time.  These include:

• ASCE Civil Engineering Database
• ASCE Conference Proceedings Online
• BuildingGreen – (BuildingGreen Suite integrates online versions of GreenSpec, Environmental Building News, and a database of more than 160 high-performance building case studies.)
• DoE Energy Codes
• Ei Compendex and INSPEC
• Environmental Engineering Abstracts
• Google Scholar
• Home Depot Smart Home
• Knovel: Engineering and Scientific Online References
• MAD CAD – (NOTE: access to cross-referenced collections of building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and maintenance codes from BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, ICC, and NFPA.)
• ScienceDirect
• Statistical Resources
• Statistical Resources on the Web-Energy
• Web of Knowledge

Eric also needed some ASTM standards for the Solar Coating project. Using How Do I access ASTM, SAE, ASHRAE, ISO or ANSI standards? Any other standards? Eric was able to obtain ASTM standards that he needed for the project. Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering and Materials Engineering Site include a few resources that may also help in future for other projects. See also Cool Roofs and Cool Roofing Materials Database available from Heat Island Group Resources.

Eric found using Knovel very useful since he was able to locate number of electronic handbooks that helped him find properties of materials through researching this database.

Eric also contributed in creating  Drexel’s web site for Sustainability and Drexel Green.

Congratulations to the Senior Design Team!

We have access to NFPA 85: Boiler and Combustion Systems Hazards Code through a database called MAD CAD.

MAD CAD is the electronic database where you can find online version of this code. It contains building codes, knowledge-based design solutions, and guidelines to meet the codes. MAD CAD will provide you access to cross-referenced collections of building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and maintenance codes from BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, ICC, and NFPA.

To access MAD CAD, go to Building Codes and click on MAD CAD.

You will need to logon with the username and password. You will see a list of codes. Scroll down until you reach NFPA 85.