In Machine Design courses, students usually learn how to design a system consisting of a shaft and its bearings under rotating, bending, transverse, axial, and torsional loads. Although most machine-design textbooks available today cover Rayleigh's and Holzer's methods, which are used in the classroom to find fundamental natural frequencies of the system in question, other important dynamic effects in shaft and bearing system design are not treated or discussed by them. Typically, considering fatigue loading effects, the diameter of the shaft is calculated, and then the deflection of the shaft is evaluated by using static deflection formulas. The static deflection assumption might be reasonable to make in ideal manufacturing situation; however, it will cause serious errors in shafts' deflection resulting from eccentric and nonaligned gears mounted on the shaft. This manufacturing defect induces loads that depend on the rotating speed of the shaft, which, in turn, causes dynamic deflections that are speed-sensitive and could fall beyond the allowable limits of deflection at the shaft's operating speed. The authors addressed this potential manufacturing defect issue in a Machine Design class as a term project, which also required students to transfer and apply content knowledge from their dynamics and vibrations' courses to come up with a viable design for the system in question. The authors and the students together believe that this project rendered important engineering education objectives in this design-oriented course. In this paper, we present all aspects of this successful experience of implementing ABET strategies in the engineering classroom to maximize its reach and potential impact.
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