Integrating fundamentals and industrial applications in a heat transfer course

At Purdue University we have addressed the challenge of providing students with opportunities to integrate and expand their skills in communication, design and earlier thermal sciences courses while pursuing industrial heat transfer problems. We observed that student motivation towards course fundamentals has increased, based upon a "need to know" that is associated with the industry-sponsored work. Our approach has involved two primary elements: enhanced traditional laboratory experiments allowing the student to set objectives using LabVIEW and an industry sponsored long-term project requiring self-designed experimental procedure. A further purpose of the paper is to describe how the course has been reshaped to meet the School's overall curriculum revision goals.