Incorporating Sustainable Engineering Design Principles into Senior Design Proposals

Sustainability as a multidisciplinary concept has been introduced and developed for over twenty years, and its principles have been well recognized by engineering professionals, especially in environmental-related fields. However, it remains challenging for most engineering educators to engage students with such a concept in their traditional technical courses. It is even more challenging to prepare students for integrating the sustainability principles into their engineering design process since it requires knowledge, training and practice. In our engineering program, senior engineering students are required to prepare their senior design proposals in a fall semester and complete the project in the following spring semester. The topics of senior design projects are chosen by students, not professors. Since last year, each team is required to evaluate the project from a sustainability point of view in the final report. Accordingly, a new approach is proposed in this paper to enhance students’ understanding of sustainable engineering design principles and to help them synthesize sustainability concepts already introduced in previous courses. This new process starts right after the students select the project topic and form in teams. A six-factor table proposed by Pawley et al. is introduced to the students. This framework is used to evaluate an engineering project at the early stage on six factors, i.e. systems, time, energy, modeling, people and scale. Each team uses the framework as an anchor to identify the sustainability related opportunities and potential issues with the topic the team selects. Then an integrated sustainable engineering design process is adopted which includes eight more tasks in addition to the thirteen tasks required in a traditional engineering design process. Consequently, each team is required to develop a sustainable engineering design flowchart that specifically ties to the team project. For an assessment purpose, preand postanonymous student surveys are developed and implemented. The results on Likert-scale and multiple choice questions are analyzed and discussed.