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Abstract In the engineering curriculum, energy remains a largely abstract concept taught piecemeal throughout various engineering disciplines. Chemical engineering concepts in heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid flow can be difficult for students to connect to their everyday experiences of turning the heat on, driving, or using a computer 1. In a time of an energy transition (Shields & Stefek, 2023) and promises of achieving net-zero goals, there is a need for students (and faculty) to cultivate an understanding of energy that integrates concepts from fundamental courses with local energy infrastructure. Through local and conceptual understandings of energy, we seek to design a junior-level chemical engineering process safety and design course that helps students develop integrated understandings of heat transfer, thermodynamics, unit operations, electricity generation, and transmission. In this paper, we, two faculty members in a chemical engineering department, detail our process of designing a new junior-level chemical engineering design course focused on sustainability and inquiry-based learning. We shed light on our own research into local energy infrastructure and provide context-rich instructional decisions for the course design. Building new context-rich courses can be a challenge that is often underestimated and undervalued 3-5. Ultimately, we designed the course to prepare students for their senior engineering design experience through a locally informed engineering design project based on interviews with sustainability and education stakeholders. Through this work, we developed three objectives of the course: (1) help students bridge their theoretical knowledge of energy with their understanding of the local energy infrastructure, (2) give students the opportunity to apply sustainability concepts within the chemical engineering framework, and (3) analyze the economic, social, and technical impacts of engineering decision-making.
Özkan et al. (Sat,) studied this question.