(577g) The Case to Make Electrochemical Engineering Concepts Part of the Core Chemical Engineering Curriculum

Decarbonizing the global economy over the next few decades is arguably the greatest engineering challenge of our time. Numerous governments and corporations are racing to deploy green energy technologies and cleaner manufacturing processes to mitigate a climate catastrophe. Electrochemical engineering is central to the green technologies that are on the horizon. Although a very mature subject with a strong connection to chemical engineering content, the vast majority of undergraduate students in the United States get no formal exposure to electrochemical science and engineering unless they take a technical elective or pursue an advance degree on the topic. Rather than introducing a core electrochemical engineering course into the core chemical engineering curriculum, it is more effective to introduce small portions of the core tenants of electrochemical engineering content in each of the chemical engineering core courses. This talk provides a vision as to how each core chemical engineering course can spend 1 to 2 weeks a semester covering electrochemical engineering topics in a given chemical engineering course (e.g., thermodynamics, transport phenomena, process design, reaction engineering, process control, and unit operations laboratory). If this vision were adopted by all Chemical Engineering Departments in the United States, we would have about 10,000 graduating students per year produced that are proficient in electrochemical processes and able to meet the technological sea change of our time.