Teaching
New Course Announcement for Winter 2025
MECHENG 499 - 003 Spec Topics in ME “Sustainable Material Use: Carbon”
Time: Wednesday: 3:00 – 6:00 PM
Location: 1940 Cooley, North Campus
Requirements: Class standing: junior or higher undergraduate or graduate level; no prerequisites
Enrollment is limited to 24. Registration after permission by instructor. Request permission by adding your name to this list.
The focus for Winter 2025 is on carbon-based materials that range from food, chemicals, plastics, fuels, and much more. These will be examined in depth from their production, use, and disposal point of view. Economic, environmental, and societal factors will be explored to gain a holistic understanding of the use of the material, any alternatives that might be used, and overall approaches to use the material in a responsible and sustainable manner. The course is team-based and includes individual assignments. It is offered as a combination of lectures with in-class teamwork. The course is open to junior and senior undergraduate and graduate students from any school or college at U-M and admission is by permission from the instructor. There are no prerequisites.
Key topics and assignments include (subject to change):
· Carbon-based materials: Define scope, goals, methods, and expectations of the course; team formation
· What is sustainability in general? What are specific issues with carbon?
· Current production of carbon-based materials, getting a sense of economic, environmental, and societal scales
· How to "measure" the carbon footprint? Concept of life cycle assessments and key features
· Carbon flows in the industrial age and climate implications
· Returning to and maintaining a safe CO2 level
· Bio-based carbon materials
· CO2 as a carbon feedstock
· Midterm reports/presentations
· Legislative actions
· Financial implications
· Supply chains
· Rattling the cage: large-scale system change is not easy
· Closing your ecosystem: a 360 view of your products
· Final reports/presentations
· 5-minute video summaries
ME 395 is a required junior-level laboratory course for mechanical engineering students.
In many ways, ME 395 provides a learn-by-experience opportunity for ME students that directly applies to engineering practice. Thus, ME 395 includes teamwork, data acquisition and interpretation in the context of experimental uncertainty, report writing, and project- and schedule-overlap, i.e. the next assignment starts before the current one is completed. The instructional team will guide students in learning how to master these challenges.
International Engineering Summer School at TU Berlin
A core mission of our educational programs in the College of Engineering is to prepare our students for the global workplace. International experience is an important element in our programs and our goal is to provide opportunities and means to enable our students to study, work, and volunteer abroad.
Visit www.engin.umich.edu/ipe for more details and ask one of the staff or peer advisors about your options to gain experience abroad and check out lots of exciting information including links to blogs that our students write from abroad.
ENGR 350 (International Laboratory Experience)
This course prepares undergraduates for collaborative engineering work that crosses international borders and cultures. Building on the successful team-approach of ENGR 100, students in ENGR 350 work in small international project teams at a partner institution. The instructional period for ENGR 350 is a minimum of four-weeks (minimum of 76 contact hours; embedded within a structured study abroad program). Course materials will be drawn from course packs and guided literature searches conducted for each project.
An example of an International Laboratory Experience is the integration into our International Engineering Summer School at TU Berlin
ENTR 490.262/263 & ENTR 590.262263: Perot Jain Techlab Climate Change
TechLab: Climate Change pairs emerging and scaling startups with top-tier undergraduate students studying a wide range of fields including computer science, data analytics, chemical engineering, material science, robotics, business, and sustainability.
The goal is to educate students through an immersive project that tackles an important problem for the company. Students learn the entrepreneurial process directly from the principles of the company using the company itself as the “living case study.”