Jackie O'Connor, left, professor of mechanical engineering, and Catherine Berdanier, associate professor of mechanical engineering, will team up on a five-year, $1 million project focused on decarbonization and sustainability. Credit: Tyler Henderson/Penn State
Q&A: Achieving energy literacy through decarbonization research
Engineering faculty Catherine Berdanier and Jacqueline O’Connor awarded $1 million grant to lead undergraduates in decarbonization research
July 29, 2024
By Mariah Lucas
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of researchers in the Penn State College of Engineering was awarded a five-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to study how undergraduate engineering students learn and develop into energy-literate engineers as they engage with long-term research experiences centered on decarbonization.
Engineering students across multiple disciplines will conduct research studies on decarbonization efforts within the energy sector. During the student studies, faculty will investigate the students’ learning processes to determine how they develop energy literacy and identities within engineering over time.
Penn State News caught up with co-principal investigators Catherine Berdanier, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Jacqueline O’Connor, professor of mechanical engineering, to discuss the specifics of the work.
Q: How is Penn State uniquely suited to complete a large-scale project on decarbonization?
O’Connor: Penn State is a unique place to do this kind of work. We really are the “energy university” — we have expertise in all parts of the energy system and our faculty deeply care about issues related to decarbonization and sustainability. This research draws on historic expertise at Penn State — renewable natural gas synthesis, combustion, turbomachinery and energy systems — and adds rigorous human subjects research to tie everything together and ensure that Penn State is graduating high-impact engineers. We have a culture of collaboration, which will make this work both impactful and fun!
Q: How will this project address both the technology and human subjects sides of decarbonization research?
Berdanier: The project integrates several research topics related to decarbonization and sustainability, using University infrastructure as a platform in which student researchers can be embedded in projects for a sustained duration of time. By also conducting rigorous longitudinal research on how these students learn and develop discipline-specific engineering identities, we can envision new future structures for educating undergrads.
O’Connor: The technology focus of this work is on the decarbonization of energy systems using renewable natural gas, an area in which Penn State has historically been an important voice. The project provides students with a unique opportunity to interact with an entire energy system, such as synthesizing gas from agricultural and wastewater sources for use in gas turbine engines as well as improvements to cogeneration facilities that can make the energy system even more efficient.
Q: What is an energy-literate engineer, why are they important and how will the studies help students develop into them?
Berdanier: An energy-literate engineer can make decisions armed with the knowledge of industry trends and an understanding of the scale of energy required by modern and future technologies. Students will recruited for the project during their second year in fundamental engineering courses related to energy, and will work as paid research assistants during their third and fourth years of college, with opportunities for internships and summer research experiences in the summer months. By embedding these long-term undergraduate researchers into industry-relevant projects for a sustained period, we hope these students can become confident in their ability to be thought leaders in the future.
O’Connor: One of the unique aspects of the work is that all the technologies studied in this work are currently operating at Penn State. As such, the students will not only be doing the research and interacting with industry professionals but will be embedded in a community that is already using these technologies. We hope that this place-based context will help students develop contextual knowledge about their work.
Q: How will this project contribute to the decarbonization of the energy sector?
Berdanier: The lineup of projects we have in which our undergraduate students will be embedded span multiple disciplines and address both foundational and applied aspects of decarbonization, such as combustion, heat transfer, design, materials, system efficiency and fuels.
O’Connor: I think the most impactful part of this work is how well all the pieces intersect with each other. The research team will be constantly interacting and sending data and results back and forth because the results of one study are closely related to those of another. Our hope is that this kind of research will help students develop a system-level view of energy decarbonization, rather than understanding just one technology.
Q: Who are the other Penn State collaborators on this grant, and how will they contribute to this work?
Berdanier: Our collaborators are Juliana Vasco-Correa, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering; Stephen Lynch, professor of mechanical engineering; Margaret Busse, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Brian Fronk, associate professor of mechanical engineering.
Each collaborator has scoped two sets of long-term projects and will advise embedded undergraduate students within those respective projects. They comprise a dream team of folks to work with — each one is doing unique and high-impact work in their own field and we’re excited that we could bring everyone together under one topic.
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