College Education

Fluid Power OpenCourseWare

The Fluid Power OpenCourseWare (FPOCW) project has the potential of exposing every undergraduate mechanical engineering student in the United States and around the world to fluid power. Its purpose is to create, digitally publish, disseminate and use high quality college level teaching materials in fluid power.

These materials exist in the lecture notes, problem sets and lab exercises of CCEFP faculty, as well as faculty outside the center. They can be used in fluid power elective courses taken by a relatively small number of engineering undergraduate students nationwide. But more importantly, materials gathered through the FPOCW project can be inserted into core engineering courses taken by all students in mechanical and related engineering ABET accredited degree programs. These required courses include fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, system dynamics and machine elements-courses with topics that form the core of fluid power yet currently do not contain fluid power applications.

In addition to gathering existing materials from many sources, the FPOCW project includes the creation of college-level mini-books on various aspects of fluid power. The initial mini-book on fluid power system dynamics targets the introductory course on system dynamics taken by every undergraduate mechanical engineering student in the United States. Typically, the course text has a chapter on fluid system dynamics, but that chapter does a poor job of covering the system dynamics of modern fluid power. Future mini-books will target the introductory fluid mechanics course and the introductory thermodynamics course, with the latter introducing pneumatics from a thermodynamics viewpoint. 

The Fluid Power OpenCourseWare Site

[Project Leader: Will Durfee, UMN]