Electrical Engineering Capstone Design

What you'll learn

• Organize a capstone design team with explicit roles, a signed charter, disclosed conflicts of interest and a schedule built with the critical path method.
• Turn a client's needs into necessary, unambiguous and verifiable requirements with sources, rationale, verification methods and traceability.
• Generate design concepts by functional decomposition, screen them against must-have requirements and select one with a weighted decision matrix and sensitivity analysis.
• Define a system architecture with interface control, a power budget and an hourly energy balance, including auxiliary loads and the winter design case.
• Design a bidirectional interleaved DC-DC converter, selecting topology, semiconductors, magnetics and capacitors, and estimating losses, efficiency and heat-sink requirements.
• Apply the Canadian Electrical Code to size continuous-load circuits, check fault ratings, ground and bond the installation, specify export protection and plan laboratory safety.
• Design layered embedded control and communications, including a priority charging allocator, a PI current loop, Modbus TCP, OCPP and DNP3 links with defined fallbacks, and defensive cybersecurity.
• Verify designs by switching and averaged simulation, worst-case, root-sum-square and Monte Carlo analysis, failure modes and effects analysis and a critical design review.
• Lay out a power converter board for low loop inductance, adequate trace width and safe clearance and creepage, and bring new hardware up in safe stages.
• Plan and run verification tests with sound measurement practice, compare results with predictions, and report narrow, partial and pre-compliance results honestly.
• Explain professional responsibility, equipment certification, codes of ethics, intellectual property and sustainability as they apply to an engineering design in New Brunswick.
• Close a project with earned value analysis, a verification summary, a rehearsed demonstration, a report for several audiences, a client handover and a specific reflection.