Training Global Engineers: A Capstone Senior Design Project in Energy Harvesting and Sustainability

As the world of engineering becomes more global in character and practice, our instructional endeavors must follow suit and enable our graduates with the necessary skills to thrive in their career. Our task is to prepare students to be more effective in a global context as well as to be able to respond to today’s challenges, giving them the competencies deemed important or even essential for global engineering work. Combined with these pressing needs are the current global considerations to conserve natural energy resources and convert to more sustainable methods of power generation. This fortunate unique combination led to the development of a series of capstone projects in energy harvesting and renewable energy areas. One project though stands out, as it serves as a model of such interdisciplinary and integrated work: under authors supervision and advising, the student-team developed a hybrid wind and solar powered outdoor (street) lighting kit, aimed to be mostly off-grid, eco-friendly, eco-designed, being able to provide significant reductions in natural resource consumption and energy costs, more flexible installations, and a significant leap forward to becoming energy independent. The paper aims at presenting the project technical aspects with a centering on lessons learned and instructional and educational aspects of developing this project. Introduction “Global Engineer” syntagm evolved into encompassing a wider understanding than before: it includes innovation and sustainability, environmental consciousness and business oriented, while serving the greater good in a multicultural environment. In the same way our curricula must evolve accordingly, integrating all these skills into homogeneous and well developed learning modules and activities. Training students to be able to identify, formulate and solve emerging engineering problems of today’s economic, social and environmental framework is a tremendous task and involves much more than a traditional engineering curricula. Engineering programs across the nation, including our program in Engineering Technology, did incorporate courses and concentration in renewable energy, sustainability, green manufacturing and so on: this remarkably increased the competencies’ quality of our students. However, the overarching integration of the knowledge acquired throughout the program’s curricula is achieved through incorporating the capstone design component in undergraduate engineering education. The design experience develops the students’ lifelong learning skills, self-evaluations, self-discovery, and peer instruction in the design’s creation, critique, and justification, contributing to the creation of the global engineer of today’s world. Combined with these pressing needs are the current global considerations to conserve natural energy resources and convert to more sustainable methods of power generation. This fortunate unique combination led to the development of a series of capstone projects in energy harvesting and renewable energy areas. One project though stands out, as it serves as a model of such interdisciplinary and integrated work: under authors supervision and advising, the student-team developed a hybrid wind and solar powered outdoor (street) lighting kit, aimed to be mostly offgrid, eco-friendly, eco-designed, being able to provide significant reductions in natural resource consumption and energy costs, more flexible installations, and a significant leap forward to becoming energy independent. The project was developed also under the guidance of the relevant departments of our Philadelphia Streets Department. The system aimed at retrofitting the existing street lighting poles and working in conjunction with current LED technology that is to be implemented to reduce the electricity demand. Students used an integrated approach of two vertical axis turbines (Darrieus and Savonius) and a PV panel, building a fully functional prototype, amenable to wireless monitoring and further improvements for increased efficiency. This unique combination proved to be able to provide 85% of the required operation power of a street-light. Combining the sustainable and relatively reliable nature of the power sources, the higher quality of light, and the reduction in fossil fuel consumption achieved, the retrofit kit may provide a great leap forward towards a more sustainable society. The paper aims at presenting not only the students achievements in terms of the project technical aspects but mostly will focus on the lessons learned and on the instructional and educational aspects of developing this project, embedded into the engineering design experience. The paper concludes with an assessment of our current work including how our findings are inspiring creation of situational prompts and activities for instructional uses. Background The United States Department of Energy has laid out a vision in 2011, which includes having the U.S. secure a leading role in clean energy technologies [1]. With current global considerations to conserve natural energy resources and convert to more sustainable methods of power generation, applied efforts need to be developed in order to integrate known methods of energy generation, and still be able to provide reliable results. Although traditional energy sources (such as fossil fuels) still meet most of our energy demands, the benefits of renewable energy have no match as being environmentally friendly while they are virtually inexhaustible. Sustainable development includes solving the sustainable energy resources problem [2]. “A sustainable energy system may be regarded as a cost-efficient, reliable, and environmentally friendly energy system that effectively utilizes local resources and networks.” [3]. Renewable energy systems range from well developed and mature technologies to new and emerging technologies in need of further research and development. In terms of societal impact, renewable and sustainable energy systems will lead to an increase on energy independence, an advance in local and regional sustainable manufacturing industries, including increased research and development components of these industries; and to promotion of regional development of the workforce specialized in the renewable energy area with a direct impact in job creation. However, this growth created an even bigger gap between demand and supply in terms of skilled professionals in the area of renewable and sustainable energy systems, and energy conversion areas. Educating students in controversial topics such as global warming, energy security, air pollution, ecological damage, reduce the carbon footprint and green-house emissions, just to name a few of them, will create a global and well rounded engineer [4]. This type of specialist will be able to identify and create solutions for these types of problems. Filling in the gap between the industry demand of specialized job skills and the current educational majors offerings at Philadelphia and surroundings local colleges and universities, our Drexel University, Engineering Technology (ET) program offers a combined electrical and mechanical engineering technology major, with several courses related to renewable energy, energy conversion, green energy manufacturing and sustainability. Our main goal is to create a highly skilled professional workforce ready to “hit the ground running” after graduation and also having most of the qualities of a “global engineer”, a critical thinker and an innovator which is in total agreement with ABET criterion c (“an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability”). Our ET program developed during the past 6-7years more and more courses oriented towards energy conversion and green energy and sustainability. As a result of this enhancement of our program, during past five years, we had an afflux of capstone project topics in the renewable energy area with a predilection towards wind and solar energy harvesting systems. During last academic year (AY), more that 50% of the capstone projects were in the green/renewable energy and sustainability fields. This coincides with a general trend of increased students’ interest in developing sustainable systems and honing their acquired skills in sustainable energy systems development through our series of capstone design courses, which is more in tune with the aforementioned criteria. Senior Design Course Sequence Overview Although our students receive an integrated theoretical and experiential learning throughout our curricula it is crucial for engineering/technology to transition from classroom work towards a more comprehensive experiential learning with applications of technology and design. The main objective of senior design courses in engineering and engineering technology curricula is to bridge the gap between academic theory and real world practice. As discussed in the ABET criteria [5] senior capstone projects should include elements of both credible analysis and experimental proofing. For the ET program at Drexel University, the senior design course is a year-long educational journey (three quarters) that takes an idea generated by a student or an industrial sponsor and culminates in a product. This course is an excellent capstone experience, which requires both teamwork and individual skills in solving a modern industrial problem. Senior design projects seminars in fall, winter and spring quarters bring the students, faculty, and industrial partners together to see the student’s results and to give them the additional experience of public presentation of their work. For an engineer in industry, a project is a sequence of tasks required to reach an objective. Typically, the objective is to design a device or process that has value to a customer (user). The proj