PANEL RECOMMENDS K-12 ENGINEERING EDUCATION
By Alan S. Brown

Teaching engineering from kindergarten through 12th grade could improve student achievement in science and mathematics, introduce young people to the excitement of design and problem solving, and increase the nation’s technological literacy, according to a new report from the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council.

The report, Engineering in K-12 Education, took two years to complete and includes a detailed assessment of 15 existing engineering curricula for grades K-12. The research committee was chaired by Linda Katehi, chancellor of the University of California, Davis, and included engineering professors, learning specialists, and three high school representatives.

The report is part of recent efforts by the National Academies to examine how to retain America’s scientific leadership and translate it into economic prosperity. The Academies tackled the subject in 2005 with Rising Above the Gathering Storm. More recently, they have looked for ways to improve instruction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, often referred to as STEM education.

The study finds that schools are expanding their engineering courses. Since the early 1990s, about 6 million students have taken formal engineering coursework. This is a much wider reach than in the past, but a small portion of the 56 million students currently enrolled in U.S. elementary, middle, and high schools.

Moreover, engineering is often pushed to the side even when discussing STEM curricula. According to the report, STEM is “often used as shorthand for science or mathematics education.” Even then, math and science are treated as entirely separate subjects. This fails to reflect the interconnected nature of the four STEM subjects in research and technology development.

The K-12 report sees engineering as a way to integrate science, math, and technology education. It shows students how to apply mathematics and scientific principles to solve practical problems.

Engineering education could also boost technological literacy, the ability to understand the benefits, costs, and trade-offs involved in decisions involving technology. Technologically literate citizens, for example, might make more informed choices about building nuclear reactors or investing in science parks.

The committee made seven key recommendations: (1) study the impact of engineering education on academic performance; (2) assess curricula to determine what works and why; (3) find ways to link engineering to other STEM subjects; (4) address a credentialing process for K-12 engineering teachers; (5) recruit girls, minorities, and other underrepresented groups; (6) identify curricula that address widely different school populations; and (7) define STEM literacy and how students can achieve it by the time they graduate high school.

Katehi believes everyone benefits from engineering education. “The problem solving, systems thinking, and teamwork aspects of engineering can benefit all students, whether or not they ever pursue an engineering career,” she said. “A K-12 education that does not include at least some exposure to engineering is a lost opportunity for students and for the nation.”           

ONE CARBON SINK MAY BE A NET SOURCE
By Jeffrey Winters

Faced with the prospect of an eventual cap on carbon dioxide emissions, companies and governments are looking at places to store CO₂ captured from exhaust streams or drawn from the atmosphere. One place to sink CO₂ that has some enthusiastic supporters is in oil wells. That is because carbon dioxide acts as a kind of lubricant inside the petroleum reservoir. The injected gas reduces the viscosity of the oil and makes it easier to draw the oil away from rocks. Flooding a petroleum deposit with CO₂, then, will help a well produce more oil. Indeed, in the U.S. some 250,000 barrels a day are produced using this form of enhanced oil recovery.

Most of the carbon dioxide used for EOR comes from geologic deposits, but some developers are working to connect power plant exhaust to oil wells via dedicated pipelines, with an eye for getting credit for sequestering the greenhouse gas. But a study published in October in the journal Environmental Science and Technology may make sequestration through enhanced oil recovery seem less attractive. According to the paper, using EOR to sequester CO₂ may result in a net increase in carbon gases in the atmosphere.

Paulina Jaramillo, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her colleagues studied five sites that use carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. The researchers conducted a life cycle analysis of each of the sites, determining how much energy is needed to run the injection plant, how much CO₂ has been injected, and how much additional oil has been recovered.

Based on this system-wide evaluation, Jaramillo and her colleagues found that for every ton of CO₂ injected into an oil well, between 3.7 and 4.7 tons are emitted, primarily from the combustion of the additional petroleum that is recovered.

The key factor between EOR being a net source or a net sink, Jaramillo found, depends on what sort of electrical power is displaced by the plant that’s sequestering its gases. After all, every megawatt-hour of electricity produced by a generating station that is capturing and sequestering its emissions is a megawatt-hour that’s not being generated by some other plant. If that plant is a traditional coal-burning power station, then using the captured gas for EOR could be a net gain. But if utilities plan to use this kind of sequestration scheme instead of using solar, wind, or nuclear power, then the result would be a net increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Since today enhanced oil recovery uses CO₂ long trapped underground, it is a net source of carbon gases any way you look at it.  

WRITE BACK SOON
By Jean Thilmany

Heavy users of e-mail, rest assured. Letter writers of yore had the same correspondence patterns as e-mail users today.

A Northwestern University study of human behavior has determined that those who wrote letters using pen and paper did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.

The study, published in the Sept. 25 edition of the journal Science, demonstrates the similarity of the pattern of human activity linking letters and e-mail messages.

The Northwestern team, led by Luís Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, created a mathematical model, which was used in a previous study to analyze e-mail behavior. Now they have applied the same research technique to some well-known letter writers who had to put ink on paper.

The researchers examined extensive correspondence records of 16 famous writers, performers, politicians, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ernest Hemingway. They found that all 16 sent letters randomly but in cycles.

A study of information in the letter writers’ journals found that they all had behaviors in common, no matter what their profession. They adhered, for instance, to a circadian cycle. That is, each one would likely write letters at a preferred time of day. They tended to write a number of letters at one sitting, which is more efficient, and the order in which they wrote had more to do with chance and circumstances than with a rational approach of writing the most important letter first.

Many of these patterns were also discovered among e-mail correspondents.

“We’re interested in identifying and understanding patterns of human behavior, in learning how we make choices,” Amaral said. “There are patterns to how we spend our days, and these models of probability, of how people allocate their time to do certain tasks, can be applied to many different areas.”

The findings can be applied to a number of modern-life situations.

“If a doctor, for example, better understands how we make decisions, he or she may be able to get better compliance with a treatment if it is tied to something a person does with regularity,” Amaral said.    

PROJECT SEEKS ROUND 3
By Harry Hutchinson

The Jamestown, N.Y., Board of Public Utilities has submitted an application with the U.S. Department of Energy for Round 3 Funding under the Clean Coal Power Initiative in support of a carbon dioxide capture and storage demonstration plant.

The project’s bid was delayed because one of the original partners, Praxair, decided to focus on a project with similar goals in Holland, Mich.

Known as the New York Oxy-Coal Circulating Fluidized Bed Project, partners with the BPU in the Jamestown program include Dresser-Rand, Foster Wheeler, Shaw Power Group, Ecology & Environment Inc., Schlumberger, the New York State Museum, the Electric Power Research Institute, Consol Energy, AES Eastern Energy, and URS – Washington Division.

According to Chris Migliaccio, the Board of Public Utilities’ deputy general manager who is overseeing the project, a new partner has stepped up to provide carbon storage technology. The company’s identity has not been made public.

The project will build a 50-megawatt plant that will burn coal in a circulating fluidized bed. It will be built on a site of an old coal plant that is currently being decommissioned.    

BRIEFLY NOTED

Minco, the engineering and manufacturing company based in Minneapolis is offering two white papers aimed at design engineers. The papers, “10 Tips for Product Development for Applications that Include Flex Circuits, Flexible Heaters, or Sensors” and “Basics of Flex Circuit Design” are available for download at http://www.minco.com/whitepapers.aspx. /// A manufacturer, ESAB Welding & Cutting Products, has added two wire drawing lines at its Ashtabula, Ohio, manufacturing facility to produce wire for high production submerged arc welding applications. The new lines will descale, clean, and draw the wire to the proper diameter, coat it with copper, and package the product. /// Visualization Sciences Group of Burlington, Mass., has launched Avizo Wind, a software package for simulation post-processing. /// Alibre Inc. of Richardson, Texas, a maker of 3-D CAD software, has upgraded its design software to Alibre Design 12.0. /// CogniTens, part of Hexagon Metrology, has published version 4.1 of its software suite for 3-D measurement systems. It offers localized language along with other improvements for CogniTens Optigo and OptiCell systems.