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Course Rationale
Engineers who pursue environmental careers have unique requirements. Many environmental problems involve low concentrations, multiple compounds with unusual physical, chemical and biological properties, and multiple phases. Since these elements are often not present in the standard chemical processing industry, students do not learn how to design a successful remediation process with these conditions. In addition, textbook correlations and process simulations of conventional remediation technologies are usually not applicable. Frequently what is overlooked is the necessity to directly incorporate analytical chemistry into environmental design.
For example, lab scale testing can show students that: the presence of chelating agents limits precipitation; pH affects filtration of clay; some pesticides adsorb only at high temperatures; and activated carbon is ineffective for certain organic mixtures. Often anomalous effects are not documented in the literature. Lab scale testing can also be used to determine optimal operating conditions and verify ppb effluent constraints. It is important that the student learn limitations of paper designs, be exposed to properties of compounds, and use lab scale testing to verify the design and obtain design parameters. In addition, of critical importance to the environmental engineer is the unique legal, ethical, health, and regulatory aspects of a project.
Mission
The mission of the COE Environmental Design Laboratory is to: 1) integrate environmental engineering concepts, including waste minimization and environmental justice, throughout the undergraduate curriculum; 2) provide relevant, hands-on experience in current and evolving remediation techniques; 3) provide a mechanism to integrate current research into the educational mission; and 4) give students ample opportunity to practice and hone their leadership, communication and teamwork skills.
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Learning Objectives
- Understand the impact of current environmental regulations on health, safety and economic profitability
- Provide an active-learning environment to enhance problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork skills
- Show that the solution to environmental problems requires an understanding of the limitations of paper designs by proving that their process works in the lab
- Gain proficiency using analytical equipment
- Identify key interdisciplinary connections and multi-disciplinary perspectives
- Enhance retention of information and comprehension of concepts through repeated hands-on student designed experiments. The retention of information and comprehension of concepts of students taught with real data is 6 times greater.
In addition, graduate students should be capable of extracting current research results - either directly or indirectly related - and applying them to the solution of a real world, practical problem.
Benefits to Environmental Education
- Students who are exposed to subject matter early in their college career and gain confidence in their proficiency are most likely to choose this as their profession.
- By proving that their design works, self-confidence in their technical abilities will increase.
- Students will be exposed to chemical property interactions. This is essential in developing in an effective overall waste remediation process.
- Graduates will go out into the work place to solve real problems in a cooperative way.
Once the effectiveness of this approach to environmental engineering education has been demonstrated, other universities may implement this novel design curriculum.
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