Inclusion of Renewable Energy Topics in the Design of Experiments Course for Industrial and Systems Engineering Students

As a branch of engineering, industrial and systems engineering (ISE) deals with the design and management of complex processes or systems. It is an interdisciplinary field that involves the analysis and optimization of the way of integrating various resources such as people, finance, information, equipment, energy, and materials. Statistics show that ISE graduates are popular in job markets and many of them end up in the high-end consulting and management positions. The success of the ISE graduates in job markets is due largely to their wide and rapidly evolving knowledge base. Design of experiments (DOE) is a general method with broad applications to identify the influences of various variations on the systems or processes. It is traditionally a fundamental course offered to students in various ISE programs across the American universities. This paper presents a recent effort at a research university in the U.S. to integrate renewable energy topics into the traditional DOE course to help ISE students update their knowledge base and foster environmental responsibility and sustainability awareness in their future careers. A new topic related to the manufacturing of a specific form of renewable energy, cellulosic biofuel, has been integrated into an eight-week course project session. The course-end evaluation and survey have shown a significant increase of interest in energy security and sustainability among students in the course. The students have been theoretically and practically more prepared with the DOE tools for the evolving job market of green energy manufacturing.