Session: 08-02 Education Issues II

Paper Number: 83102

83102 - Energy and the University: The Role of Gas Turbines at US Universities and Strategies for Enhancing Energy Literacy 

Ambitious international decarbonization goals and growing demand for energy are two powerful mandates that set the agenda for the gas turbine industry for the next several decades. To meet these goals and needs, education and workforce development need to focus on the development of not only technical skills, but energy literacy. Energy literacy has three components – the cognitive (awareness of energy concepts and technologies), the affective (awareness of the interaction between energy and greater societal issues), and the behavioral (agency to make energy-related decisions) – that can be significantly enhanced by not just curricular interventions, but also non-curricular activities. This paper begins by describing the energy landscape at Tier 1 Research (R1) Universities in the United States. Over 30% of R1 universities in the US use gas turbines to help meet their campus power and heating needs, and over 50% of these universities have public facing information about campus energy production and usage, indicating an opportunity for enhancing energy literacy amongst the student body through better energy communication. Using these peer institutions as a backdrop, we focus on efforts by the Center for Gas Turbine Research, Education, and Outreach at the Pennsylvania State University to enhance energy literacy through both curricular and extracurricular interventions. The extracurricular intervention includes an energy dashboard, displayed in the student collaboration space for the department of mechanical engineering, that shows real-time statistics on power and steam production, as well as gas turbine engine data from an advanced instrumentation package in one of the power stations on campus. The curricular intervention includes use of data from this dashboard in an introductory thermodynamics course, including the use of engine data in Brayton cycle analysis. In describing these efforts, we highlight the critical role that gas turbine technology and the gas turbine industry can play in enhancing the technical education and energy literacy of the future workforce.

Presenting Author: Erica Winegardner Pennsylvania State University

Presenting Author Biography: Erica Winegardner is a Masters of Science student in the Reacting Flow Dynamics Laboratory at the Pennsylvania State University.

Authors:

Erica Winegardner Pennsylvania State University
Emma Lemay Pennsylvania State University
Stephen Lynch Pennsylvania State University
Karen Thole Pennsylvania State University
Jacqueline O'Connor Pennsylvania State University