BEE 2220

Sustainable Engineering Thermodynamics

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

The laws of thermodynamics are elegant statements about the conservation, nature, and behavior of energy in the universe. They are also the roadmap to designing and evaluating sustainable solutions to the world's most pressing challenges, from climate change to food insecurity to the energy crisis. After all, the problem of climate change is essentially an energy imbalance between the heat flow into and out of Earth. The goal of this course is to explore fundamental thermodynamic and kinetics concepts as they relate to key sustainability challenges. We will examine how the first and second laws of thermodynamics underpin life cycle analyses. We will use the concept of exergy to benchmark forms of energy and their potential to do work, enabling us to evaluate policies that promote sustainable solutions such as transportation fleet electrification and landfill diversion strategies. Together, we'll break down complex concepts such as Gibbs Free Energy and Chemical Potential to understand why pollutants move as mixtures in the environment and how the sea level is rising because of human activities.

When Offered Spring.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: MATH 2930 or equivalent; CHEM 2070 or CHEM 2090 or CHEM 2150 or equivalent; and BEE 2510 or BEE 2600 or equivalent.

• Identify, formulate, and solve quantitative thermodynamic relationships for complex systems integrating knowledge from chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, and prior mass & energy balance courses.
• Understand the complex, interdisciplinary nature of sustainable engineering problems, and the challenges faced by those who seek to address them.
• Propose and evaluate technical and non-technical aspects of sustainable engineering design solutions using thermodynamic and kinetic fundamentals.
• Identify needs for new information, define a process to find information, and develop the ability gauge the reliability of information.

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