Abstract:

The work presented has been carried out in the subject entitled Thermodynamics for sustainability: 4E Techniques (Thermo4E) is located at the second semester of the Master’s Degree in Energy Engineering of the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineers of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSII-UPM). It receives pupils from different schools around the world, especially from Spain, Latin America and Europe.

This subject integrates thermodynamics with economic and environmental analysis. The main goal is to explain how these three topics are related to the design of a thermodynamic process, so that a technical, design variable affects the performance of the whole process in the three lines simultaneously. The students will finish the subject having applied two different methods for calculating an optimum design to different processes.

The nature of concepts involved in the subject starts from the precision of engineering, evolves into the tentative nature of economy (e.g., discount rate, production forecasting) and are finally generalized into environmental, energy-policy notions such as the effect of green-tax policies on the profitability of a given plant.

In general, the students' original approach to thermodynamics is very practical and case-specific, which in spite of having certain advantages for thermodynamic analysis, makes it difficult for the student to progress into the more sophisticated parts of the subject. In this sense, the theoretical background of the students may show significant differences.

These are very different mindsets, so a unified vision is difficult to build even if some concepts were already familiar to the student.

This subject has been under constant development since academic year 2018-2019. During this process it has evolved from a highly-theoretical approach to the current, mainly problem-based-learning. At first the theoretical content was developed in class and only a few exercises were solved by the lecturer in order to exemplify the concepts. The students were required to learn autonomously, and to hand in a short number of exercises during the course. The outcome was not as expected because the works required several iterations until were finally correct, putting an unintended load of work on the pupils and the lecturer with no clear benefit. The main cause for this was identified as the impossibility of the pupils to reach the required command of the theoretical contents, fact that rendered the exercises unreachable.

This last year 2021-2022 represents the final stage in the evolution of the subject, and to our judgement is the first complete realization of the new teaching philosophy. The teaching methodology has been pushed progressively towards a problem-based approach involving a much larger number of exercises of a lesser difficulty, which pose short term, attainable goals for the students, and which form a series which breaks the theoretical evolution of the subject in short phases, so that progression of the student is guided.

With this new teaching philosophy, it has been achieved that students manage to consolidate and / or acquire new knowledge by giving them a plus of concepts that they have acquired as reflected in the evaluated works. It has been achieved that the students show a great interest in the subject how it was seen in the surveys carried out on the method and syllabus of the subject.

Keywords:

Problem-based, project-based, Thermodynamic, Economic and Environmental Analysis.