Work in Progress - An Innovative Sustainable Energy Engineering Graduate Curriculum

Sustainable energy engineering is an important emerging area. A survey of sustainable energy engineering curricula shows a number of programs in Europe and Australia, but very few in the United States. We have started to offer a new Sustainable Energy Certificate program in the College of Engineering at Villanova University and are in the process of developing this into a full Master's degree program. The certificate program is open to all engineering graduate students and comprises four courses, one offered by each of the departments in the College of Engineering. The certificate comprises four courses as follows 1) Principles of Sustainability - offered by the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department 2) Electrochemical Power Sources - offered by the Chemical Engineering Department 3) Renewable Energy Systems - offered by the Electrical and Computer Engineering department 4) Solar Thermal Processes - offered by the Mechanical Engineering Department This paper will describe the details of these courses and how they are structured to allow students to take the courses with limited pre-requisites. Furthermore, the structure of the new Masters program under development will be described.