SUSEE on hsf

Ilmenau Sustainability Corner: Radio hsf interview on Sustainablity in Engineering Education

Last week, two representatives of the Erasmus+ project SUSEE(SmallerUniversitiesfor Sustainabilityin EngineeringEducation) were invited to the Campus studio of Radio hsf to discuss about current and future activities within this EU-funded partnership program. The roundtable consisted of Dr. Diana Moehrke-Rasul, representing the International Office of TU Ilmenau and serving as project coordinator; our colleague Christian Karcher of our Group Department of Technical Thermodynamics, representing the professors involved in SUSEE; and Dr. Mira Rochyadi-Reetz from the Institute of Media and Communication Science, acting as interviewer and moderator.

During the discussion, it was emphasized that Engineering Thermodynamics is among the most important disciplines for successfully implementing principles of sustainability in any engineering action involving the conversion, transport, and storage of energy. Within the so-called Virtual Lecture Series, this aspect was addressed in two special lectures for the international students, already given by our colleagues Christian Karcher and Christian Cierpka. Also, all guests agreed that especially smaller universities - due to their focused scientific profiles and short decision-making processes - are well-qualified to foster transformations in higher engineering education towards a sustainable future when acting as an international alliance.

As an outlook, in the last week of March, around 20 students from the partner universities, - i.e., UITM in Rzeszow, Poland; UTC in Compiègne, France; and unibz in Bolzano, Italy - will come to TU Ilmenau for a winter school where practical training, technical excursions, and lab tours, all of which addressing the UN SDGs clean and affordable energy, climate action, and human well-being, will be jointly undertaken. Here, our group will contribute with supervising a case study in which the students can perform experiments on an educational heat pump system to identify and evaluate the process parameters that lead to the best coefficient of performance.

The already recorded talk will be on air on Monday, February 3, 20:00 hours on Radio hsf UKW 98.1 MHz or via internet as part of the bi-weekly English broadcast of the Ilmenau Sustainability Corner.