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An engineering design report is written to introduce and document engineering design projects. Audiences include other engineers interested in the functions and effectiveness of the design and management interested in how the design can be applied and commercialized. Engineering students, for example, have written about the design of a temperature measurement and display system using a microcontroller and the design of a device to simulate flow through a ribbed cooling passage. Engineering students at Carnegie Mellon have designed a thermal-release ice maker.

The design report has many of the same parts as the engineering report presented elsewhere in this chapter. The key differences are of course the purpose of the design report and special sections that are peculiar to this type of report. You can get an immediate sense of those sections by looking at Figure 6-6, which shows the table of contents of the thermal-release ice maker. Figure 6-7 shows pages from the body of the report.

Appendixes

Appendixes are those extra sections following the conclusion. What do you put in appendixes? Anything that does not comfortably fit in the main part of the report but cannot be left out of the report altogether. The appendix is commonly used for the following:

In other words, anything too large for the body of the report or too distracting and interruptive to the flow of the report is a good candidate for an appendix.

Documentation

Documentation is the system by which you indicate the sources of the information you borrow in order to write a report. Many engineers use the system created by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), examples of which are shown in the figures throughout this chapter. Other engineering documentation systems vary only slightly from the IEEE system. (See Chapter 11 for details.)

Related Information

I would appreciate your thoughts, reactions, criticism regarding this chapter: your response—David McMurrey.