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4/24/2009 Rice engineering students head to Middle East on senior design projectsBY DWIGHT DANIELSSpecial to Rice News A promising international and interdisciplinary engineering design course finds nine Rice engineering students headed to the United Arab Emirates in the coming week to rendezvous with fellow students from the U.A.E., France and Japan. The initiative -- the brainchild of Fathi Ghorbel, professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering -- allows Rice students to finalize their crucial senior engineering projects. The students have been working over the past year with their foreign collaborators on projects of interest to the oil services industry.
Known as the International Engineering Design Project, the course grew from Ghorbel’s collaboration with the global firm Schlumberger and his yearlong stint at the Schlumberger Riboud Product Center in France. Company officials backed the effort because they see it as an educational model reflecting the way the engineering world is moving -- distinct but collaborating teams from across the globe working on engineering problems at the same time. “Now we’re uniting the students in person to do the final systems integration on their projects,” Ghorbel said. “It’s a chance for all the students from the various nations to meet and put the pieces together just as engineers do in the real world.” Choy said the Rice students are really looking forward to seeing international team members face to face, after months of email, lengthy Skype calls and videoconferencing sessions. “It’ll be interesting to see if everything we’ve done really fits together as seamlessly as we hope," Choy said. "When our team here has been awake, the other teams are asleep, so there have been lots of challenges in communication to overcome. But that’s exactly what we’ll face in the future in an increasingly connected world.” The French students are from Supélec, Écolé Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers and École Centrale de Lyon. The Japanese students are from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Along with their Rice colleagues, they will fly into Abu Dhabi May 1 to meet their United Arab Emirates University counterparts to work over three days at Schlumberger’s state-of-the-art U.A.E. research campus to finalize the projects. On a final additional day, the teams will present their work and demonstrate prototypes to Schlumberger executives and U.A.E. Ministry of Education officials. Among the prototypes are robots that inspect the interiors of oil pipes, robots that can release stuck cables within pipes and floating, disposable miniaturized tools that do not need attached cables. --Dwight Daniels is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. |
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