Mechanical Engineering - Theses
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ItemThe design of engineering products( 1963)This thesis examines the design of engineering products. Its purpose is to clarify the role of design in engineering, to give a general description of the design process, and to emphasise aspects of the subject which are not widely recognized, or if recognized are not applied. in practice because of the designer's preoccupation with the rush of day-to-day problems. Parts of the thesis inevitably reflect a bias towards the author's experiences as a mechanical design engineer in privately owned industries where the products were manufactured in small or medium-sized batches. This bias is most clearly evident in chapter 3, but also appears in sections of chapters 2 and 4. All in all, a broad perspective has been adopted with the intention that the thesis should cover a wide range and not be confined to the interests of a special branch of engineering. For this reason the word “engineering” in the title has not been qualified in any way. After giving considerable thought to this subject the author came to the conclusion that there was scope for bringing together in one paper the ideas and concepts which are of major importance in engineering design. All too often these are not appreciated by the individual designer, because references to them are widely scattered throughout the literature or because he allows himself to be immersed in the minutiae of his work.
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ItemCavitation in hydraulic machinery: its influence on the design of impellers for centrifugal and axial-flow pumps( 1963)This thesis considers aspects of rotating hydraulic machinery of the centrifugal, mixed-flow, and axial-flow types; wherever the word "pump" is used without any qualifying adjective it is understood that it is a generic term which includes all these types. The objective is to present and discuss the methods available for the design of pump impellers for cavitating or near-cavitating conditions. In order to give an orderly and logical account of this subject the thesis opens with a description of cavitation in hydrodynamics, and this is followed by an examination of its mechanism and of the physical factors which affect it. Model experiments are an important tool in assisting the designer predict performance and one chapter is therefore devoted to a discussion of model laws and scale effects in cavitation. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the detailed design of impellers for non-cavitating and cavitating flows, while the final chapter evaluates this work and draws some general conclusions.
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ItemCreative design skills of engineering students( 1972)An investigation has been carried out into the creative design skills of engineering students in the University of Melbourne. In order to tap students' creative abilities, open-ended design problems representative of those encountered by the professional engineer in practice were devised. Students' responses to the problems were then observed and analyzed. The results showed that there were many interesting and apparently important aspects of the students' creative problem-solving behaviour which could be identified and measured, but which were not revealed by performance in conventional university examinations. These aspects of problem-solving appear to be important from the point of view of the students' later professional careers, but further work is needed to confirm this.