SYDE 285: Material Chemistry

Surprise? It's not traditional Chemistry. I thought my IB HL Chemistry would finally help with this course. Weirdly enough, one of my friends said it almost felt like a Product Management Course, and I can see where they're coming from. We focused a lot on user requirements, constraints and objectives of different materials and their characteristics.

This was one of the only courses that had a required live aspect and I honestly felt like there was that sense of togetherness seeing all the project teams meet in their respective channels.

In terms of the content, it wasn't too fast paced and the textbook was a really good resource. The actual assignments or course content wasn't very difficult however the group project was a bit challenging. For the group project, we had to apply all we learned to pick a material given a set of constraints and justify our selection. We had to use different software such as ANSYS and GRANTA for the failure analysis and material selection process. Learning to use this software was a bit of a steep learning curve and also being able to justify your selection and communicate your recommendation well.

One of the difficulties of the group project was that only students with Windows computers will be able to access this software. There are options with remote desktops, but they're not as reliable. ANSYS requires a lot of hard-drive space as well. This was hard in groups since not everyone would have access to the software, so a lot of the load would be depending on a few people to access the software. Hopefully in the in-person execution of this course this won't be a problem as there will be lab computers available!

Advice to anyone taking this course in the future:

For the group project: make sure your reports are very well done and look professional. Use graphs and charts from the software itself to justify your recommendations and choose your constraints and objectives for your materials wisely. Don't choose a material that doesn't meet all the constraints and objectives you listed earlier! If it doesn't meet one of them, remove them from your constraints/objectives or justify why it's not important.