Project-based learning under Computerised Education in Heat and Power Technology

Introduction The teaching in Heat and Power Technology world-wide (and in most other technical fields) is usually performed in a classical way in which students listen to some lectures and then solve some textbook problems. Some students also select a project of more applied nature, but these are usually fairly small and do not illustrate the complete course work during a full academic year. Mostly the students do not see the relevance of their studies to real engineering problems until after the end of the studies. The Division of Heat and Power Technology (HPT) at KTH approach the problem of teaching the last-year undergraduate students the basic knowledge in Heat and Power Technology in a different way. The students and teachers are involved in a "role play" project during one academic year. A company has been founded which intends to construct a power plant for a specific purpose, and delegates the buyer s role to a consultant who in turn intends to have the students at HPT design the complete power plant during one academic year. This project will be integrated inside the Computerised Educational Program currently developed at the Division (Fig. 1). This project started in 1996 and aims at developing an interactive platform for the teaching of Heat and Power Technology. A CD-ROM is available which offers a number of interactive simulations and multimedia presentations dealing with several fields related to Heat and Power. Inside this CD, the students will find the various reports and presentations made by the students who took the course the previous years (Fig. 2). Fig. 1: main interface of the Computerised Educational Program developed at the Chair of Heat and Power Technology, KTH. http://www.egi.kth.se/compedu/ Fig. 2: Presentation of the Project of Year 1999/2000 inside the Computerised Educational Program. http://www.egi.kth.se/compedu/ Educational Objective The objective is that the students in an independent and engineering way shall apply the acquired knowledge in the heat and power curriculum (and earlier courses) towards solving a real engineering problem of doing the basic design of a power plant, while working in a project-team. The students should learn how to, in an independent way as well as part of a team, find important and necessary information in textbooks, and other material outside of the known textbooks. Course Organisation The students are the persons performing the project. They select themselves the task-leaders for the various tasks that have to be performed. The task leaders are responsible for delivering certain results at specific dead lines, where a Design Review Team (=DRT) will evaluate the results and inform the project participants, with the expertise the DRT members have, about which direction seems to be the most appropriate. A co-ordinator will be appointed who is a link between the students, the teachers, the Design Review Team and the Company. The co-ordinator will have to handle different kinds of problems that will occur during the Project. The technical knowledge the project team will have to acquire in order to solve the various sub-tasks in the project will be presented as lectures at the appropriate time during the whole year. The students will also be able to use the CD-ROM developed at the Chair, which teaches Heat and Power Technology thanks to interactive simulations and multimedia theoretical parts. An extremely good communication link between the students, teachers and the DRT members should be established. This must be computerised in order to save time and so that all participants will have immediate access to all the necessary information. With this aim in view, an on-line discussion group will be set up and all the reports from the previous projects will be available on the CD-ROM developed at the Chair. This is not just another calculation from a textbook. It is a real power plant, which the students have to study. As such there is of course not only one possible solution to the project. The students will thus during the year have to take a lot of 'engineering' decisions which certainly will influence the design of the whole plant. For these, the students will have to come with clear suggestions/recommendations before the Design Review Meetings, so that a detailed discussion can take place and a decision can be taken. The final presentation of the whole project will take place towards the end of the academic year. The project team will afterwards go to the foreseen location and meet a larger group of engineers. During this study trip several other power plants/components manufacturers will be visited

Congress, Compacts, and Interstate Authorities

This paper summarises the authors’ own teaching experiences from two large MSc-level courses taught as part of several international Master programmes related to Sustainable Energy Engineering, organized by the Department of Energy Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden.   Some important hinders and obstacles to effective learning are presented and discussed, addressing especially certain challenges for the students and their effect on student performance. Observations have been made throughout several years of increasing demand for energy- and sustainability-related knowledge by ever larger student groups. The growing number of international students and the fact that many students are aiming at expanding their abilities by specialising in energy engineering without having the necessary background, as well as the fact that many students following certain non-engineering programmes focusing on environmental or sustainability issues need nevertheless to study also purely engineering courses, brings many positive characteristics to the blended student team but also displays serious challenges to the practical optimisation of the learning activities, the intended learning outcomes, the speed of advancement in knowledge, and the general quality of education for such a diverse group of students. Possible improvements and augmentations of the learning activities with the goal of finding solutions to these challenges on both a programme level and course level are proposed and subjected to testing in recent student batches. The expected results in terms of improved student performance, and the plausible further extension of this work, are introduced and analysed.QC 20120308</p

The Design of a Solar-driven Catalytic Reactor for CO2 Conversions

AbstractThe solar energy has been employed to provide the heat for CO2 conversions for several years except for its use on power generation, since it is one of the most common renewable energy resources and the total amount is enormous; However, the dominant method is to concentrate solar rays directly on reactants, relying on the design and quality of the receivers a lot. The operation and maintenance of the receivers require extra attention due to the delicate structure of the receivers and the potential contamination on the lenses from the chemical reactions. To steer clear of the shortcoming, a solar-driven catalytic reactor has been designed and analyzed in this article. The reactor drives the endothermic reactions with the heat source of hot gases, which are produced in solar receivers upriver, thus the flexible and necessary operations on the catalytic reactor could be peeled off from the solar receiver, and the potential contamination on the optical components in the solar receiver could be avoided. The design processes and details are described, the heat performance is simulated and analyzed, and efficiencies are theoretically calculated in this article. The solar-driven catalytic reactor exhibits the possibility of the practical use of solar energy in CO2 conversion and recycle

Interactive teaching and learning platform in Energy Technology

The 20th century has been rich in terms of innovation processes in information technology. However, there is one place that has not been strongly affected by information technology: the classroom. Peculiarly, teaching methods have hardly changed over the last hundred years. In this context, the Division of Heat and Power Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology started to develop Computerized Education Platform (CompEduHPT), an interactive learning platform which sets a new standard for elearning of energy technology in a global life-long learning perspective (Figure 1). The main objective of the platform is to enhance the learning by providing to the students and teachers the necessary multimedia tools. This has been done through the use of a platform in which the information has been collected, processed and presented in a pedagogical way using several multimedia advantages. The program is intended as a platform for an international collaboration on learning energy technology. It can be used both in the classroom as well as for self-studies and is as such well adapted for both university and post-university learning, both on and off campus. Tools to facilitate the introduction of new material exist. It is thus hoped that teachers at different universities can join forces and in a non-competitive way by introducing material which can be shared, instead of developing similar simulations with somewhat different interfaces