Conference Session

Curricular Developments in Energy Education II

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Teodora Rutar, Seattle University; Gregory Mason, Seattle University

Tagged Divisions

Energy Conversion and Conservation

involved biology. The biology professor is particularly knowledgeable andpleasant person to work with. Also, their sponsor interactions included interactions with abiologist. During the second project, the students were disinterested in performinginterdisciplinary work, yet they functioned on an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students,that included both biologists and chemists. Some of the interactions of that interdisciplinaryteam were strained however. The mechanical engineering students did not communicate wellwith the chemistry student. The communication was so bad that mechanical engineeringstudents believed that they could have completed the same tasks better without that student andwith the chemistry professor’s guidance. Since the

Conference Session

Curricular Developments in Energy Education I

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Robert W. Fletcher, Lawrence Technological University

Tagged Divisions

Energy Conversion and Conservation

about possibly offering a bachelors degree in alternativeenergy engineering or a degree in energy engineering. Administrators at Lawrence Tech alsoinquired about the possibility. Faculty members in the program have remained cautious,however, about starting a new degree in Alternative Energy Engineering, or even a degree in themore generalized field of Energy Engineering. Bass and White note that “As a metric for howunderserved energy engineering is in the United States, consider ABET does not list "energyengineering," or any permutation thereof, as a separate discipline.”15 Lawrence Tech has seen aninterest from its students regarding such a degree. Industry, however, does not have anyfamiliarity with what constitutes such a degree. Would such

Conference Session

Investigating Alternative Energy Concepts

Collection

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Ahmed Rubaai, Howard University; Abdul R. Ofoli, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Tagged Divisions

Energy Conversion and Conservation

cadre of graduates who value experimentation as an essential and natural part of solving engineering problems; 4) to prepare students for industry as well as advanced courses and research and development oriented careers;Hardware DescriptionThe students are given a tutorial that leads them through the experiments, describing thehardware apparatus and the actions to be performed in each step. The hardware apparatusused in this experiment, shown in Figure 1, consist of: 1) a DC-DC switch-mode powerstage converter9, 2) a 14-bit PCI Data Acquisition Processor (DAP 840/103)10, 3) atermination board (MSTB 010-06-C1Z) [15], 4) a Pentium III 550-MHz personalcomputer (PC) with Windows NT 4.0, and 5) a micro-controller (PIC16F877)11