Enhancing technical communication skills of engineering students: an experiment in multidisciplinary design

A multidisciplinary team of chemical engineering and computer science students collaborated to design a plant capable of producing commercial quantities of citric acid. This project required the students to produce a bench-scale chemical engineering facility and a computer system to monitor production in accordance with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. A previous attempt at student collaboration on a similar project produced less than stellar results. An evaluation of that experience revealed the most significant challenge to project success was establishing effective teamwork and appropriate technical communication across the two disciplines. This paper describes the results of the most recent multidisciplinary team experiment, in which emphasis was placed on developing communication between student teams. A description of the synchronization of project development methodologies between the participating disciplines is discussed as well as how this contributed to enhancing technical communication between the teams and enabled the latest project to progress to a successful conclusion