ASET Technology Alberta Summer 2016 - 18

Red Deer College PROJECT NAME Advanced Heating Solutions -Flameless Heater PROJECT SUMMARY Our group's project was given to us in the fall of 2015 when a client approached the college with his hydraulically-controlled flameless heat generator. He asked that we test multiple areas of the unit to determine its overall efficiency, and that we identify aspects of the unit that could be improved to make it more efficient and easier to maintain and manufacture. Bryce's Project Perspective One of the main portions of the Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) Program is the capstone project, which all graduates must complete. I was assigned to a team of four-two other MET students and one in Electrical-tasked with improving a flameless heater. We called upon skills we had built up over the course of the program, while developing others we will need to be successful in the work force. What really jumped out at me is that we needed to be effective project managers, learning to manage our time, how to do divide the workload evenly among group members, and how to interact in a professional manner with the client and with fellow group members. All members of the group got the opportunity to take a lead role at different time, which helped all of us develop leadership qualities. Our group also faced some setbacks that we needed to deal with including issues such as client communication and being unable to deal with time constraints. All these challenges needed to be accounted for and we learned a lot just by dealing with them. I feel that overall, the capstone project was one of the most valuable parts of the MET Program and it will help all of us as we move forward with our careers. Jordan's Project Perspective The largest project completed in the program was the two-semester long capstone that I completed with two fellow Mechanical Engineering Technology students and one enrolled in Electrical Engineering Technology. Having people from both programs helped in that we were able to bring to bear multiple perspectives to find solutions to our problems. The project was beneficial in terms of learning to work and mesh as a group to meet a challenge based on an existing industry procedure. The group learned to work well as a team and whenever any group member struggled in a certain area the rest of us would help him through it. One particular thing I learned is that a student-client relationship is quite important for a successful project. Both sides must communicate often and feel comfortable doing so. If the communication is delayed or not complete the project can get off track in a hurry; that's something that must be corrected as soon as possible. The difficulty in our project was that the flameless heating unit was still being revised and altered by the client so our schedule had to be adjusted to match the client's. We were able to adapt well and our project was completed on time and to the best of our ability. 18 | SUMMER 2016 | TECHNOLOGY ALBERTA Ryley's Project Perspective For the duration of our capstone project, all members of the group cycled through roles allowing each person a chance to gain experience in different positions. Throughout the project I was responsible for sharing the role of initiating communications among the client, our group, and our capstone instructor. I was also involved with efficiency-testing design and execution, and manufacturability. I was the user-serviceability co-leader and also researched alternative components for the unit. A major obstacle our group had to overcome was communication with the client as well as the availability of the unit. We were able to work around this by allowing additional time in our project schedule to ensure that in the event of a delay there was ample time to get the necessary work done. Another difficulty we had was organizing all the members of the group to meet and work on the project while balancing the heavy workload. This we managed easily by having each member be willing to make the necessary arrangements to meet, and by using resources such as Google Drive, which allowed us to work on the project from anywhere. The capstone allowed my fellow group members and me to gain valuable experience in project management and research, which will be directly applicable to industry projects in our future careers. Elliott's Project Perspective Being the only Electrical Engineering Technology student in a group of four (the other three being in the Mechanical Engineering Technology Program), and having been assigned a mechanically-based project, I had more of a project manager's role. That meant I ensured that we stayed on task and met milestones. We each also had a hand in communicating with the client to exchange information and ask questions. A big thing I learned on this project was the importance of communications amongst team members and with a client. Balancing the workload was also key to completing this project successfully. Handy tools that helped manage both challenges were Google Drive, and supporting online software such as Google Docs and Google Slides. They permitted all the members of the group to access the same documents and work on them together in real time, allowing many hands to make light work of various documents that had to be written. The Drive also gave our group a place to store the documents and other files so we, our client, and our instructor could all access them.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASET Technology Alberta Summer 2016