University-Industry Partnerships to Enhance Engineering Education

Engineering education is facing a lot of challenges nowadays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and low enrollment issues that caused lowered funding opportunities and administrative budget reductions.Engineering educators are required to play vital leadership roles to face these challenges.Combining efforts and collaborating with other programs and external partners, including community colleges, industry personnel, companies, and businesses, becomes a necessity to enhance engineering education.Technology education, on the other hand, is very dynamic and changes daily.At the technology education level, establishing a partnership and collaboration with industry can help to address some of these challenges.The advantages of university-industry partnerships (UIP) are both incredible and numerous.The strength of any university's program depends on staying relevant to innovative technologies used and current market trends, not only regionally but globally as well.The collaboration between Purdue University Northwest (PNW) and LinMot USA is a great example of a successful universityindustry partnership.Through a donation of hardware and software to the university, the goal of this partnership was to build a portable trainer system including a linear electromagnetic actuator integrated with an industrial controller to enhance the capabilities of engineering technology labs.The objective of this project was to provide a demonstration presenting the ability of electromagnetic linear motors to be used in several industries, compared to many cases of the common pneumatic actuator.Electromagnetic linear drives can be integrated with many industrial controllers, such as the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC).They can be embedded as inputs such as switches, sensor I/O, or directly through a PLCs logic programming.Regarding the scope of this project, the authors created a state-of-the-art trainer system to be used in engineering technology laboratories and to enhance students' hands-on skills using innovative technology.The steps of the design are discussed and explained.