How to ensure your Final Year Engineering Project Stands out

Make your Engineering Final Year Project Stand out

It is a known fact that students find it daunting to choose a topic for the Final Year Project. It requires a high level of consideration and assessment from the students. Mainly the Final Year Project defines the career path chosen by the students after their degree. As part of the Final Year Project, you will be producing a major formal report on your own, and you must select a project topic which you find interesting. Your chosen topic must also have a future scope in your respective field. If you are unsure how to choose a Final Year Project Topic, please read the following articles:

How to Choose a Final Year Project Topic

Final Year Project Selection Tips for Beginners

How to Select a Final Year Project Topic for Electronics

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has not been easy on anyone. In particular, the pandemic has affected students worldwide who cannot attend schools, colleges and universities to get a traditional education. Nowadays, with some of the pandemic restrictions still in place, more uncertainties are created. With the onset of the pandemic, now on top of choosing the correct topic for your project. How do you ensure your project is not impacted by the ever-changing constraints resulting from the pandemic? This article will discuss how you ensure your final year engineering project stands out despite all these restrictions and hardships.

I will describe a five-step recipe to ensure that your project stands out and you get those well-deserved marks.

Well, here are the five steps that you can follow to undertake a successful engineering project:

1. A Project Topic with Practical Application
2. Design
3. Validate
4. Optimise
5. Project Report

Step 1: A Project Topic with Practical Application

The first step in answering the question, How to ensure your Final Year Engineering Project Stands out, is related to choosing a good practical project topic. I cannot stress enough the importance of choosing a final year engineering project topic with a practical application. Therefore, you must select a final year project topic that solves real-world problems.

Professional engineers solve real-world problems. Hence, if you would choose an engineering final year project topic that solves a problem faced by the industry of your choice, then this will be a big plus. You will not only gain confidence in your respective field, but when you apply for jobs after graduation, you will stand out from other candidates.

A hands-on Practical Final Year Project

The final year engineering project must be hands-on and practical work must be shown, whether in the form of hardware, software or both. If it is not practical to do a hands-on final year project, students can choose a simulation-based project. In my opinion, a student must only pick a simulation-based project as a last resort. One of the main reasons for this argument is that there are limited research-based jobs around as compared to practical hands-on jobs for engineers. A student is most likely to get a job offer if he has developed a hands-on final year engineering project compared to a student who has done a simulation-based final year engineering project.

I understand it is likely difficult to access the labs, workshops, and technicians during the pandemic restrictions. However, if a student can work around these restrictions to do a hands-on final year project, this will eventually pay off. A student can do most of the work outside the lab or at home if possible and then go to labs for validation and testing.

Step 2. Design

Most engineering final year project topics are about designing something to solve a problem in the real world. Depending on your field, the projects can vary as the possibilities are limitless. Some mechanical and electrical projects are listed below for the sake of examples:

Example Electrical and Electronic Projects

1. Home Automation System using IoT
2. An improved Fieldbus communication system
3. Air Pollution Reporting System
4. Smart Parking System using IoT
5. Smart Streetlight monitoring system

Example Electrical and Electronic Projects:

1. Design of a wind turbine for use in an urban area
2. Improved aerodynamics for fuel consumption reduction
3. A heat pump for residential use
4. Weight reduction of the suspension on a racing car
5. Design of an automated robot to clean Solar Panels

It is essential to mention that you must choose something within your capabilities for your final year project. When selecting your Final Year Project, you must also ensure that the university has the facilities you can utilise to complete your final year project.

Questions that the Final Year Students should ask themselves

It would help if you asked yourself pertinent questions along the following lines:

• Does the university have the right set of equipment, lab, workshop and tools for you to design the project?
• Is there a manufacturing facility in the university that you can use to manufacture a prototype?
• Does the university have the required hardware and test equipment for you to test and validate your prototype?
• Are there technicians available at the university to help you with your chosen project topic when you get stuck?
• If you need to do finite element analysis or simulate a particular problem, you need to check if the university has the right software and someone trained in the software.

These are the questions you should ask yourself before you begin, as not thinking about them can lead to a slew of issues after you start the problems.

Step 3. Validate

A good validation plan can make a difference between a good and a badly executed project. Hence, validation is an important aspect when it comes to answering, How to ensure your Final Year Engineering Project Stands out. The easiest way to validate your design is to build and test it. You can make use of the university’s labs and workshops. I suggest creating a test matrix to define your project’s use cases and test accordingly.

I would suggest dividing projects into different small modules and then defining a test matrix for each of the modules. Firstly, you must complete functional testing and failure mode analysis on each module. Then, once it is proven that all the individual modules are working, you must connect each module and test the entire product. You can use calibrated measurement and test equipment in the university labs and workshops. However, you must also consult your project supervisor and get them to review the test matrix to ensure you have not missed any critical testing.

Result Validation using Past Projects

If your project is a continuation of someone else’s work or your project closely matches another project done by someone else in the past. You must validate your results against the results of other projects. We advise you to use Google Scholar to research project topics similar to yours and then validate your experimental data against the test result data found in those projects. You will feel more confident if you can verify your results against the results of another project/study published in a journal.

For example, suppose you have been working on developing a device that will track human arm movement using an accelerometer, and you have got some results. In that case, it would be great to find a journal article where a similar study showcases a different technique. You can then compare the similarities of your test setup/hardware and results and if the differences between your results and another study’s result were marginal. Of course, the more studies you find to compare against yours, the better, as this will let you find any issues early on.

Step.4 Optimize

After the design and validation, you may think the project is over, but you still need to optimise it. Design optimisation is a crucial part of the project. You must reserve enough time in your project timeline to analyse and execute the project optimisation stage.

The optimisation stage of your project demonstrates that you can increase the efficiency of a design, reduce the cost of manufacturing or increase performance.

You can reduce the cost of your project by looking at alternative components and seeking to optimise the manufacturing processes. In addition to this, you can also keep the overall cost of the project low by optimising the assembly and test processes by using automated assembly and test fixtures.

You should also think retrospectively and devise different ways to approach the project. Therefore, you should think about how you would have done the project differently if you were to start again. It would help if you also recommended different ideas and future improvements that can be used to refine further and optimise your project.

Step 5. Project Report

Finally, you must write a comprehensive report to detail the following aspects of your project:

1. What problem are you trying to solve
2. What is the background, and how can your solution help the industry
3. Literature review and details of any other work related to your project from journals
4. You should detail the method and approach you took in your project to develop a solution to the problem
5. Detail your test method and how you validated your project results
6. It would be best if you also discussed how you think your project is a success or otherwise
7. Present ideas as to how you can further improve your project
8. It would help if you also drew a firm conclusion

Your Final Year Project Report is the most crucial piece of a report that you would ever write as part of your educational career. You must write the report such that a non-specialist can understand it. Your project report carries a lot of marks. Hence you must pay special attention to it. It is best to start writing your final year project from the beginning of the project. Continual work on the final year project report will help you tremendously and avoid pressure near the completion of the project.

Conclusion

This article discussed a five-step process detailing how you can make your engineering final year project stand out.

Practical Application

Firstly, we discussed how it is vital to select a project topic with practical application. Your engineering final year project must include hands-on work and should solve a problem. We advise that you choose a hands-on project compared to a theoretical or simulation-based one. A practical engineering project will give you the most credibility when you apply for engineering jobs.

Check Available Resources

Secondly, to make your engineering final year project stand out and be executed successfully, you must ensure your university has the required facilities. You must check that the university’s lab and workshops have the tools necessary to manufacture and design your prototypes. It is best to divide the project into smaller modules and develop each module independently. Suppose you are working on a project that is reliant on special software. You must ensure that the university has the required software and someone who is an expert in the software to help you if you get stuck.

Result Validation

Thirdly, you must validate your engineering project. Again, it would be best if you used the test and verification tools available at the university. We would advise that you test and validate each of your project modules independently, both in terms of functionality and fault analysis. Once the module verification and testing are completed, you must complete module integration and validation.

Project Optimisation

As part of your final year project, you must also reserve some time to optimise the project. You should also give recommendations about other methods that you think are better than your methods. Any future work recommendations would also become part of the final year project report.

Lastly, it would help to concentrate on writing a comprehensive final year project report. Your report must cover your project problem, your proposed solution and the outcome of your project. It would be best if you remembered that your final year engineering project report carries a lot of marks, and you should start working on this right from the beginning of your project.