Reference no: EM132667080

42908 Engineering Project Preparation - University of Technology Sydney

Task Individual Project Proposal

Your research project proposal can be presented in headings or sections, e.g.
1. Background (Optional)
2. Research Question
3. Methodology
a. Data Collection
b. Data Analysis or Interpretation
c. Validity of Potential Results or Findings
4. Project Management
a. Scope of the Project
b. Process and time-line
c. Milestones and Resources
d. Uncertainties and Risks Control
e. Communication Management
5. Progress Statement
Some explanations of the assessment criteria:

• Social/economic/ethical consequences
In this project proposal you should discuss relevant social/economic and ethical consequences or impacts of your proposed research. This relates to the mapping of uncertainties and risks for your project control.
You can also discuss from a critical perspective of the social/economic/ethical impacts relating to the technology that you are focusing on.

• Progress statement about achieved and expected workloads of the project
The progress statement refers to a review of your project implementation from the beginning of this subject to its current status. How many milestones have you achieved? What do those achievements mean to you? (e.g. Did the actual working-hours exceed the planed input? If so, what were the reason?) Did your project go smoothly? What were the difficulties? Did you overcome them? What is your estimated time of completion? With your current productivity, will you achieve that goal?
Write something about these questions in your progress statement. It demonstrate your project management skills.

• Problem definition, methodology and project management plan

In your project registration, you may have started with a general idea or a broad topic. In this task, your research question needs to be focused. You now know what the data is and how to analyse it with specific tools. Use the feedback that you get from your supervisor to refine your problem definition and the methodology. If you read some more literature, you can add them as appropriate into your writing.

Use the feedback from the teaching staff on your project management plan to improve your project management plan.
Turnitin submission of Task 4 consists of the following:
1. The Cover page
2. The body of the project proposal
3. Charts and Tables may be included in the appendices.

A Generic Guidance for Research Methodology Writing (Scientific and Social Research)
In general, methodology refers to definitions of research questions, ways of answering those questions with academic rigour, and reasons why you think those answers can be valid.

We engineers normally carry out "empirical research", that is to say, we try to propose solutions with "empirical evidence". Such empirical evidence is consider as "data". It might be easier for students who are doing scientific and social research projects (refer to slides used in workshop2) to find the relevance of the notion of "data" to your project. For students who are doing engineering design projects, please refer the notion of "data" to design parameters - critical parameters that you consider in your design.

There are 4 components required in your methodology chapter:
• Definition of what is regarded as "data", empirical evidence or design parameters etc. in your problem solving (refer to the above explanation)
• Explanation of what is the method of data collection and how the data can be interpreted (this component ask you to explain to your reader on what is your data? how you are going to get that information? what do you think about its validity? (e.g can you believe in everything you read from a magazine?)
• Construction of a theoretical framework of problem solving (a logical/rational way of thinking of the cause effect relationship) that justify the approach and process of problem solving (For example, if you are going to carry out an evaluative study about the pros and cons of a technology and your research is based on carrying out some lab experiments, you need to explain why the experiments are "designed" like that way. Saying other people have done the same does not justify the reason why you are doing it. You can be inspired by others but you need to be specific about your project in the sense that why such a way of answering your research question is appropriate. )
• Literature review of relevant research/publications. (You'd better use "high quality" references)

Research Methodology Chapter Writing Advice for Students doing Engineering Design

If you are doing an engineering design project for your capstone, e.g. creating a prototype or making modifications to an existing technical artefact/system, you may find the concept of "data" and its analysis not quite fit into your research paradigm.

In this case, we recommend you to present your engineering design process in this chapter. The design process refers to the intellectual "work-out" process demonstrating how you construct/build a technical artefact or system to achieve certain functional requirements. In plain words, how you transform your concepts into physical structures.

Previously in your study as well as in this subject, we recommend you to adopt a systematic approach of engineering design. This means that, in most cases, you need to follow three major phases of your design namely the conceptual design, basic/embodiment design and detailed design. For detailed explanation, please refer to the suggested reading provided in the learning materials.

Thus, this chapter can be structured with the following components:

Conceptual design in which you define the major functional requirement of the system. For example, a 1000Mwe class Nuclear Power Plant.
Basic/Embodiment design in which you clarify a breakdown of the major functional requirement into sub-functions. You define sub-systems in this section. For example, a 1000 Mwe class Nuclear Power Plant consists of a nuclear island and a conventional island - the turbine generator. You can run further breakdowns if you regard the nuclear island as an independent system.

Detailed design in which you focus on the issuance of engineering documents leading to the manufacturing of one piece of equipment. For example the reactor vessel - mechanical design. Detailed design is manufacturing oriented. Please list a few manufacturing problems and possible solutions that you can foresee in this section.

If you are doing a design for a system your Basic design is essential. If you are doing a design for the manufacturing of an artefact, logically the detailed design is appreciated.

A possible structure of writing up your methodology chapter(s) is proposed as such:
• Research Question(s)/Object of Design
• Literature Review: how other people interpret or answer these questions. (Existing Designs)
• Two types of literature review: Descriptive and Critical.
• Methodology/Design process:
• What is your data?
• Method of data collection?
• You can have some literature review about the methodology here.
• Discussion: Discuss the validity issues here.
• Data
• Findings
• Potential findings: Discuss how your research findings/object of design might be looked like, and how you are going to interpret those.

Written communication features:
• Critical analysis and synthesis
• Appropriate academic language
• Well structured (presentation and organisation) and correct referencing

Attachment:- Project Proposal Template.rar