(541b) Embedding Engineering Research in Process Design Education

Technical literature search is undoubtedly one of the most important components of chemical process design. However, many undergraduate students graduate without knowing how to effectively search, synthesize, and utilize knowledge from vetted technical literature (e.g journals, patents, standards, handbooks) in engineering design settings. Students tend to over rely on surface-level Google searches, while underutlizing powerful information discovery toolsets that are available to them through organizational subscriptions, such as Knovel and Engineering Village. Research skillsets are most successfully learned in context of an actual project, rather than a one-off lecture. To this aim, Research Sprints are a fast-paced student-centered learning experience that combine elements of design thinking, agile processes, and engineering research together, to layer in technical acumen with collaboration and communication skillsets.

Knovel is an engineering decision support tool that builds upon a rich corpus of engineering textbook and material property content to serve engineering analytics use cases. Engineering Village complements Knovel with deep indexing of engineering journal, conference, IP, standards, and funding literature. In this talk, we will demonstrate how Knovel & Engineering Village can be used together into the classroom to expose students to technical literature and apply the insights in engineering design.