2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With modern industrial development, the increase in carbon dioxide emissions caused global warming and climate change in the whole world. “Carbon Emission Reduction” has become the most important goal of all nations. It is the major issue discussed at the recent G20 Summit 2021 in Rome. Each nation promised a specific goal of carbon emission reduction. However, to reach those promised goals, besides replacing fossil energy with green energy such as solar, wind, water, or nuclear, the design of those green energy power plants and equipment and the design of green energy using machines, buildings, vehicles, and other energy-consuming equipment is also critical in reaching those goals. Green energy usage education is becoming important for the current engineers and future engineers who will do all those designs.

Engineers' design mindset will greatly impact society because they either directly or indirectly design buildings, machines, vehicles, infrastructures, power plants, petroleum refinery processes, etc. Their finished design could affect a family, a city, a county, a nation, or even the whole world in a period such as the design of nuclear power plants. Whether the engineers have “go green” in their mindsets, could affect people’s lives and the overall environment of this world, and it will determine if the nation can reach its emission reduction goal.

Engineering students are future engineers. Most students’ understanding of “go green” is a government or politicians slogan. Besides recycling their recyclable trashes at home and driving a Tesla if their financial conditions allow them to do so, which has already made them proud of themselves for being “green”, most have never seriously related this term to their future engineering design job.

To help the engineering students to develop the “go green” mindset and put this term into action, each engineering program should have some strategies and specific requirements for their engineering education. One direct method is to put this “green” requirement into engineering students’ design classes and make it a required element in their design projects.

The engineering program we are working for has three required design classes: freshmen design, which introduces freshmen engineering students to the concept of engineering design through simple entry-level design projects; junior design, which helps students to learn to do engineering design documentation through working on a major knowledge required design project, and senior capstone design. Freshmen students’ engineering design is limited because students don’t have deep and broad enough engineering knowledge to do “green” design. One good choice is to implement this “green” requirement in junior design class when engineering students have learned enough engineering knowledge to perform major engineering design and are capable of researching to find the best strategies for “green” design. Once they learn the “green” idea, they can implement this strategy in their future senior capstone design and carry on this “green” mindset in their future engineering design jobs. They will become the direct human power in pushing the world to be emission-free.

To do this, an overall “green” requirement will be put into the junior design requirement. Students must find the best “green” choice for their specific design projects. A survey was done at the end of the semester to check the change in students’ energy usage design mindsets. The survey results show that only 62% of the students thought about using green energy in their design before this class; 95% of the students would like to use green energy in their design after this class because of the green energy requirements. Among this 95%, 100% of those who worked on projects directly related to green energy decide to use green energy whenever possible in their future design. However, only 82.5% of those students whose projects were not directly related to green energy applications. The results clearly show that the “go green” requirements in their design class greatly influenced their energy usage decision in their design. It demonstrates the importance of the “go green” requirement in engineering education.

It is our intention to illustrate the detailed process of this “Go Green” approach in our junior design class, the preliminary results achieved, and the plan to carry on to the senior capstone projects in future research.