Development of Low-Cost Laboratory Experiments for Southern Arkansas University's Engineering Program

The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary work and plans related to the development of several low cost laboratory experiments in the newly established engineering program at Southern Arkansas University (SAU).SAU was recently approved to initiate a new engineering program, and the university officially started it in fall, 2014.An immediate requirement of the new engineering program is to develop two teaching labs -Solid Mechanics Lab and Thermalfluid Science Lab.Considering the available resources and the time, the faculty decided to develop several low cost lab setups to meet teaching requirements.In the current work the proposed labs will be mainly used in the Thermal-fluid Science Lab course.Those setups include the following: a conduction heat transfer experiment setup to demonstrate the Fourier's law of heat conduction; a transient heat transfer setup that uses lumped capacitance method; a hydrostatic force on a submerged surface experiment setup; and a mini gas turbine setup.The possibility of using the gas turbine setup using an alternative fuel is also discussed.The expected cost (approximate) for each experimental setup is discussed as well.