MikeyWings
Standing back from the aviation, and talking about the academic side of it:
TOPIC
In picking your topic, it’s important to choose one that gives enough for you to be able to work on it, rather than one that sounds nice but won’t give you anything to work on. By doing work on it, I mean:
- you doing a laboratory or field experiment to collect data, or
- taking someone else’s data set, and analysing that, or
- doing advanced engineering computation.
Generally your lecturer/university will have some experiments already going on, and there will be sections of research to be done by you in these experiments. In other cases, you may be working for an employer that has their own data or laboratory that can be used. Otherwise you’ll have to find some data to analyse.
Examples of topics I have given students at the 4th year civil engineering level, in each of the above categories, include:
Field experiment – we were measuring friction on an airport and some freeways. We had a new type of friction measuring machine. The student worked with the operator to test them with the new machine and to test them with our old type of machine, and to development the calibration equations for the new machine against the old machine.
Someone else’s data - There are major databases of long term pavement performance (LTPP) which can be accessed freely on the web and used to test hypotheses. This research study examined if the initial roughness of a pavement section has any effects on its long-term performance. The statistical tests performed indicate that asphalt and concrete pavements with low initial smoothness stay smooth over time.
Advanced engineering computation – we had a new bitumen product combining bitumen and solvent to make something that could be sprayed at low temperatures, covered with stones, and then which the solvent rapidly evaporated and it hardened in a couple of days. The student analysed the diffusion of the solvent through the bitumen using advanced diffusion mathematical modelling.
TITLE
The trick is to make your title/topic narrow rather than wide. You haven’t got much time available (compared to masters and PhDs), so it helps being narrow. Hugel [and others] has made some good suggestions already, such as: “HUD Installation on civil aircraft”. That could be written up in several areas such as installation, design, effect on safety, cost/benefit analysis, ergonomics, etc. You could even narrow that down further into “A comparison of single and dual HUD installations on civil aircraft” if you had the data or experiment available to enable you to research in that narrow area.
TIME ALLOCATION
The optimum allocation is to allow a quarter on reading up (literature search and writing it up and recording the references properly), a quarter on getting your data, a quarter on data analysis, and a quarter on writing it up. No-one ever does that, but it is nice to dream of it.
Don’t get caught in spending half your time on reading, and the second half on getting your data, and leaving nothing for analysis and writing up. Many students do that, and have a tough time at the end frantically writing 18 hours a day to get what can only be a poor mark.
LITERATURE REVIEW
This is the bit where you read up about what is known in the field, and get the extracts and quotes to use in your report (without plagarising them), and where you write up your references.
It is not just using Google. Instead, use ‘Google Scholar’ as the minimum. I just tried it now and got 53,000 good-quality hits searching on 3 words ‘head display aircraft’. Then of course you have to start to sort through them, and maybe do more searches to narrow things down a little. Once you have the titles of papers you want to read, you need to use your university’s library – they have the online subscriptions to access the better journal articles.
For example, one journal article I just found sounds pretty good for you to read:
The Efficacy of Head-Down and Head-Up Synthetic Vision Display Concepts for Retro- and Forward-Fit of Commercial Aircraft by Lawrence J. Prinzel III; J. Raymond Comstock Jr; Louis J. Glaab; Lynda J. Kramer; Jarvis J. Arthur; John S. Barry. In International Journal of Aviation Psychology, Volume 14, Issue 1 February 2004 , pages 53 – 77
The library should allow you to access that journal free and online, and even if not, they will get you the article for free in a few days anyway. I reckon at the 4th year level, you’ll need 20+ references, of which 5+ will be journal articles.
I strongly suggest you write the references up properly on the day that you access it or you will lose them. The simplest is to use a Word file and just keep adding to it and sorting it at the end. Here is the sort of stuff that should be appearing in it within a couple of days of starting your literature search (these are civil engineering examples from a recent student of mine):
Moranville-Regourd, M. (1997), Cements made from blastfurnace slag, Chapter 11 of Lea’s Chemistry of Cement and Concrete, 4th edition, Arnold, London UK. pp. 634
Sherwood, P.T., (1995) Alternative Materials in Road Construction, Thomas Telford, London, UK.
Shi, C., Wu, X., and Tang, M. (1993), Research on alkali-activated cementitious systems in China: a review, Advances in Cement Research, Vol. 5, No. 17, pp1-7
BTW the ‘Prof’ in my avatar stands for Professor.
Last edited by OverRun; 8th May 2011 at 10:01.
Reason: To better explain some points