The motivation for this work is embedded in the title of this post and is based on a lack of innate mechanical knowledge and that is become increasing apparent in students entering a Bachelors degree in Engineering. I guess we should not be surprised by this as we can see a correlation between the need for a skill and the number of people who possess it. Anecdotally, talking to the generation of mechanical engineering that came before me, many spent a fair fraction of their time under the bonnet of the ‘best car they could afford’, doing regular oil changes, topping up the coolant and watching the thermostat on those long summer drives. A lot can be said for the reliability of the modern automobile, and manufacturer of these vehicle have also their best to ensure that the people rarely have to do anything other than hand the keys to their mechanic once a year. Sadly, this means that even if you did carry the tools required to remove the plastic covers that hide most of the mechanical components of a modern vehicle, a large percentage of people who might wish to pursue a career in Mechanical Engineering, would probably not have a great idea of what they were looking at.

Of course I make a number of generalisations here and I should make a shout out to the young engineering students who devote the vast majority of their spare time to working in student teams, be they building rockets, designing, building, manufacturing, and racing cars, or developing autonomous rovers and air vehicles (https://www.monash.edu/engineering/student-experience/teams-and-clubs).

For those who aren’t fortunate enough to get the opportunity to participate in hands-on extracurricular activities, what can we do to help them develop a deeper understanding an appreciation of existing mechanical systems, their components and the ways in which they can be combined to achieve a desired purpose.

Could Virtual Reality (VR) be the answer? Maybe not on its own, but surely it could play a role. This was the premise we were looking to explore. The thermodynamics course, I was teaching at the time, had a laboratory that required students to measure the brake horsepower and fuel consumption of a single cylinder diesel engine, under different throttle setting. The goal of this was to relate the energy output to the chemical engine being fed into the engine, relate this to the thermodynamic cycle and calculate the efficiency of the engine. As an educator you get the usual questions about the number of cycles and strokes of the engine, and at the time I thought, wouldn’t it be great, if rather than referring to an animation of a diesel engine, the student could actually play around with the internal components of the same engine they were testing. Some of you may have heard the term ‘digital twin‘ and this would very much fit with that idea, but then I started thinking of how so much more could be learned by assembling the engine itself. This would allow you to not only understand the role of a camshaft, but also the importance of the alignment of components and the need to design them in a way that they can be located relative to each other, and removed as needed.

What you can see below, is an early attempt at building a VR experience in which students could gain the experience of assembling the engine, in their own-time, without the need for safety inductions, scheduling, or the risk that one student might damage or lose a piece of the engine and ruin the experience for their peers. There is still room for improvement, and polish, but I will leave that to the next student and a future post.

Credit for the above demonstration goes to Wesley Flavell, a final year Mechanical Engineering Student under my supervision, who put most of this together from home during the Victorian COVID-19 lockdowns of 2021.