Engineering Processes for Environmental Sustainability

Catalog description

Students will quantitatively understand and analyze environmental issues such as: the impact of industrial contaminants and excess nutrients on water quality; the global carbon cycle; improving global access to clean water. This course integrates principles from chemistry, biology, math and engineering to understand and solve real-world problems that impact three major environmental compartments: air, water, and soil. Students will solve mass and energy balances beginning with simple, closed systems, then progress through reactive, open systems to describe environmental fate and transport of pollutants, natural environmental cycles and remediation scenarios. Students will be exposed to technical and lay material from interdisciplinary sources to understand the environmental externalities - social, political, economic and cultural - that must be considered when proposing solutions to today's most pressing environmental issues. BE and EnvE students must complete either BEE 2510 or BEE 2600 according to their academic plan. Students who complete both BEE 2510 and BEE 2600 receive engineering credit toward their degree for only one of these courses.