(245b) New Developments in Implementing Green Engineering in the Chemical Engineering Curriculum

The goal of this presentation is to outline updated green engineering and sustainable engineering content for undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering education. The work of chemical engineers is central to the development of sustainable chemical and energy production systems and to meet global human needs. Incorporating environmental issues and sustainability into the design of engineered products, processes, and systems generally means evaluating environmental, economic, and social performance. This presentation will summarize two approaches to incorporate green and sustainable engineering into undergraduate chemical engineering education; i. a stand-alone elective course, and ii. modules for required core chemical engineering courses.  The modular approach, one or more chapters in a forthcoming 2^nd edition of “Green Engineering: Environmentally-Conscious Design of Chemical Processes”, Pearson-Prentice Hall, can serve as stand-alone supplementary materials for core chemical engineering courses.  For example, in a thermodynamics course, environmental equilibrium partitioning and fate properties of chemicals could be a supplemental topic and these properties can be predicted with group contribution or other structure-activity relationships.  In a mass balance course, these environmental partitioning and fate properties can be used in conservation of mass problems involving accidental releases of pollutants to  various environmental media; air, water, soils, and sediments.  These and other examples of incorporating green engineering concepts, methods, and tools in core chemical engineering courses will be presented.