Training global engineers: A capstone senior design project in energy harvesting and sustainability

Abstract

As the world of engineering becomes more global in character and practice, our instructional endeavors must follow suit and enable our graduates with the necessary skills to thrive in their career. Our task is to prepare students to be more effective in a global context as well as to be able to respond to today's challenges, giving them the competencies deemed important or even essential for global engineering work. Combined with these pressing needs are the current global considerations to conserve natural energy resources and convert to more sustainable methods of power generation. This fortunate unique combination led to the development of a series of capstone projects in energy harvesting and renewable energy areas. One project though stands out, as it serves as a model of such interdisciplinary and integrated work: under authors supervision and advising, the student-team developed a hybrid wind and solar powered outdoor (street) lighting kit, aimed to be mostly off-grid, eco-friendly, eco-designed, being able to provide significant reductions in natural resource consumption and energy costs, more flexible installations, and a significant leap forward to becoming energy independent.