Expanding the Frontiers in Green Engineering Education

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“Greening” the engineering curriculum is an important consideration for sustainable engineering education from fundamentals to design in the 21 st century. This paper describes the latest advances in an educational project sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to integrate green engineering principles into the chemical engineering curriculum. This project has engaged faculty from engineering schools across the country to develop web-based instructional modules to allow for the seamless integration for green engineering principles such as risk concepts, green chemistry, mass and energy integration, life-cycle assessment into chemical engineering courses. Currently, faculty have contributed to chemical engineering core courses from material and energy balances to plant design. In addition, faculty have developed modules for multidisciplinary offerings such as freshman-level introduction to engineering and upper-level system dynamics and control. This paper will review some of the innovative modules developed and show how they can be used in the chemical engineering curriculum. This educational project’s goal is to integrate green engineering concepts horizontally and vertically into the curriculum by taking existing courses and integrating topics as appropriate through examples, problems and case studies. Using green engineering principles at the start of the design process can lead to processes and products of a sustainable future. Support for this project is funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances through grant CX 827688-01-0 titled Implementing Green Engineering in the Chemical Engineering Curriculum