USING LOW-COST HANDS-ON EQUIPMENT AND VIRTUAL LAB FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING OF MECHANICAL VIBRATIONS

Hands-on learning elevates the student's learning of abstract topics to a new level so they will bridge the gap between the theory and its application area. Although mechanical engineering students are only exposed to hands-on learning in laboratories, students take the fundamental course separate from labs which are offered in the following semester or year, unlike mechatronics, electrical, and computer engineering students. Additionally, the laboratory equipment utilized in mechanical vibrations and control labs are very expensive and bulky and integrated with their own software preventing students to discern signal flow and data recording using sensors and data acquisition systems. To address this problem, we designed two low-cost, portable, and 3D-printed lab equipment for the mechanical vibrations control theory courses and their associated laboratories so that faculty can bring it into the classroom for a quick demonstration and build multiple of the same setups for the lab courses to demonstrate modeling of mechanical systems and fundamentals of vibrations. In addition to the developed equipment, we created a virtual lab in MATLAB Simscape so students can work on the analysis at their own pace.