ENGINEERING TRIPOS PART IB - 2012/2013

Sustainable Engineering

Leader: Dr H R Shercliff

AIMS

The need to move rapidly toward a lower carbon economy is widely accepted in the Engineering community, to mitigate against climate change, to improve future energy security, and to assist the developing economies of the world. This course will illustrate some of the current issues and applied developments relating to sustainability, in all areas of Engineering. Students follow up the lecture course with their own short research project over the Christmas vacation, submitted as a poster.

OBJECTIVES

As specific objectives, at the end of the course students should:

• Appreciate the scale of the global challenges in energy production and control of climate change, and the importance of identifying, quantifying and pursuing the developments which will have significant impact.
• Understand a range of opportunities to reduce energy consumption and to implement lower carbon technologies, in different sectors of engineering, in both developed and developing economies.
• Complete a technical investigation into an aspect of Sustainable Engineering of their own choice.

SYLLABUS

A combination of CUED teaching staff and external speakers will address the following topics (Abstracts):

1. Oct 25th: Dr Julian Allwood, Sustainable materials and lower carbon processing
2. Nov 1st: Mr Michael Ramage (CU Dept. of Architecture), Novel tile vaults in sustainable buildings
3. Nov 8th: Mr Helge Urdal (National Grid), Power System Challenges on the Road to delivering Sustainable Energy for GB by 2050
4. Nov 15th: Dr Claire Barlow, Critical materials and sustainability
5. Nov 22nd: Dr Alex White, Energy storage

COURSEWORK and ASSESSMENT

Coursework instructions will be issued with suggested issues and questions to follow up on each lecture. Students will identify and select a technical topic of their own choice and interest in the broad area of Sustainable Engineering, either motivated by the lectures and suggested topics, or from their own reading. Independent research into this topic will be conducted over the Christmas vacation, leading to preparation of a poster summarising the key findings. The expected time to be spent on the research project and poster is 10-15 hours.

Deadline for poster submission (in electronic format as PDF): Friday January 18th, 4pm (via CamTools: details to follow).
Standard credit: 10 marks (from maximum of 14); penalty of 1 mark per day poster is late.

REFERENCES

Additional on-line resources for this module will be provided via Camtools

Recommended books for the research project and for general interest are:

• David Mackay, Sustainable Energy - without hot air (available online)
• Michael Ashby, Materials and the Environment
• Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen, Sustainable Materials - with both eyes open (available online)