Research Reports

Research Reports

Overview

Research teams are required to submit a research report approximately every other week, or as noted on the syllabus. The exercise is not intended to add extra work, but rather facilitate a joint team effort of learning and reflection.

Target Audience

This document should make sense to a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara.

Expectations

A research report is a written document that reflects the high level of effort and professionalism expected in the engineering profession. Spelling and grammatical errors should be eliminated. Your team is expected to follow the formatting guidelines dictated on this page and utilize your best judgment when writing these reports. Your reports should always have a designated Report Proofreader; this individual is responsible for ensuring that there are no spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors. Different individuals on your team can hold this role over the course of the semester, but be sure to note who holds that role in each report that you submit.

These reports should take significant effort, time and thought. We anticipate that each team member on average should spend about an hour every two weeks with writing or editing. Supporting data and/or code will be uploaded as separate documents later on in the semester, but the report itself should be easily understood without having to look at the supporting documents.

The report should include the following sections with some flexibility based on the scope of your project:

• Detailed task list - You should keep and update your detailed task list from the first assignment in each of your reports. Denote completed tasks and modify your deadlines to reflect your most recently completed progress and any delays.
• Literature review - Discuss what is already known about your research area. Connect your objectives with what is already known and explain what additional contribution you intend to make.
• Introduction - Explain how your completion of your challenge will affect AguaClara and our mission of providing safe drinking water (or sustainable wastewater treatment!). If this is a continuing team, how will your contribution build upon previous research? What needs to be further discovered or defined? If this is a new team, what prompted the inclusion of this team?
• Methods - Explain the techniques you have used to acquire additional data and insights. The techniques should be described in sufficient detail so that another researcher could duplicate your work.
• Analysis - Connect your work to fundamental physics/chemistry/statics/fluid mechanics or whatever field is appropriate. Analyze your results and compare with theoretical expectations or if you have not yet done the experiments, describe your expectations based on established knowledge. Include implications of your results. How will your results influence the design of AguaClara plants? If possible provide clear recommendations for design changes that should be adopted.
• Conclusions - Explain what you have learned and how that influences your next steps. Make sure that you defend your conclusions. (this is conclusions, not opinions!)
• Future work - Describe your plan of action for the next several weeks of research.

It is too easy to create a report that is full of opinions and unsubstantiated conclusions. Defend your conclusions using your engineering skills. If you have an opinion (hypothesis) that you wish to include, explain how you will test your hypothesis.

Formatting

Here is a template that can be used directly to build a research report. 

The file name shall be "Report <team name> <semester> <year>". For example, the foam filtration report name would be "Report_Foam_Filtration_Fall_2011"

The documents you submit will be Google docs uploaded to your folder in the AguaClara Google Drive. You should email your research advisor informing him/her that of the file path once uploaded.
All formatting should follow Grammar Guidelines for Reports.

Each report should include the team name, team member names, and date. You will also identify primary responsibilities/roles and who is fulfilling which role in these two weeks (i.e. data analysis, experimental operation). To help facilitate knowledge transfer and learning, these roles should rotate throughout the semester so that every person does not just have experience, but is competent with all aspects of team success.

Process Controller Method Files and Experimental Setup

If your experimental setup uses Process Controller to run experiments, there should be a detailed explanation of the method file used and which file you have used that produced final data.  Provide a thorough explanation so that an incoming team will be able to understand why certain set points were chosen, what rules govern switching between states, etc.  

Research Writing

We have also provided guiding questions that are vaguely related to assist you in your writing.

Stand-alone Document

The report must be a stand-alone document. Important equations must be documented and explained. Variables used in equations must also be labeled. Include visual figures of theoretical and experimental results whenever possible with accompanying explanations of how these are related to your research or design.

Submission

You must upload your reflection report to the AguaClara server in your teams file by the end of the night on Friday (by midnight). Directions on how to connect to the server can be found here. Due dates for these reports can be found on the current semester syllabus. Late reports will be penalized 10% each day that they are not turned in.

Posting Files on the Wiki

Your team should post only the final version of the report at the end of the semester to the wiki. See the wiki organization guide for directions on how to post documents. Note that all team submissions will have the same file name and will be posted as such to the wiki.

Revision Process

Each submission of the reflection report is cumulative and must be a revision (with track changes turned on) of the previously submission. All comments from the reviewer must be left in the document and the team should address all comments by either making changes to the report or by adding comments. The reviewer will accept changes and delete comments that have been addressed so the report doesn't get too messy with the track changes function.

Grading

The following rubric breaks down how all reports are calculated. Your advisor will include this table and your team's score in each category for each report.