An excited student design team from the STEPS Program will travel to the US this month to compete in the second International Design Challenge at the Colorado School of Mines. The winning team from the PI is one of nine multidisciplinary teams from STEPS II who competed to go to CSM to match their design of a solar furnace against the winning team from CSM. The competition is part of a collaborative initiative between the PI and CSM on “Preparing Global Engineers: Engineering Design Education Across Cultures.” Both the PI and CSM design programs teach strategies for team-based engineering problem-solving, and the students’ challenge this semester has been to design a solar furnace prototype to destroy hazardous waste produced by the ADNOC refinery at Ruwais.
The competition strives to guide and enable culturally diverse second-year engineering teams in the development and application of creativity and ingenuity in formulating solutions to contemporary global open-ended problems. The objective of the June 08 design competition is to investigate the feasibility of using solar energy for waste disintegration, and then compare the option of a solar furnace to a conventional gas-fired system in terms of technical and economic factors. The project exposes the students to the concept of harnessing renewable energy resources, environmental issues in engineering design, basic heat transfer principles, manufacturing methods and materials selection, modelling, safety, as well as societal and economic considerations.
We send the best of luck with our students to win the competition in June!
