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Creativity is universally acknowledged as an important attribute of successful engineering design, but individual attributes and preferences can influence whether creative ideas come to fruition during the design process. However, few studies have explored the factors that can predict creative concept generation and selection in engineering design education. Thus, the current study was developed to provide an empirical understanding of how student designers' preferences for creativity predicts their ability to generate or select creative design alternatives during the concept screening process above and beyond the effects of personality through an empirical study with 178 engineering students. The factors explored included the Big 5 factors of personality, the preferences for creativity scale (PCS), and the novelty and quality of ideas generated and screened. The results show that the openness personality trait can predict the novelty of generated ideas as well as the novelty and quality of selected ideas during the concept screening process and that the creative confidence and preference factor of the PCS can predict the novelty of generated ideas and the novelty and quality of selected ideas during the concept screening process beyond the Big 5 factors of personality. A similar finding was obtained for the risk tolerance factor of the PCS. These findings demonstrate the importance of an individual's attitude toward risk and their creative confidence in the generation and selection of ideas in engineering education and provide a foundation for future research geared at building student innovation capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting excellence in sustainable manufacturing has emerged as a strategic mission in academia and industry. In particular, universities must prepare the next generation of engineers to contribute to the task of sustaining and improving manufacturing by providing appropriate types of sustainability education and training. However, engineering curricula are challenged in delivering educational training for assessing technical solutions from the three domains that define sustainability: economic, environmental, and social. In the research presented here, an educational framework is developed with an aim to improve student understanding of sustainable product design (PD) and manufacturing. The framework is founded on the analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate (ADDIE) model for instructional design. The developed framework is demonstrated using an example of a sustainable PD activity. This instructional design case study illustrates how engineering students would be able to investigate the impacts of raw materials, unit manufacturing processes, manufacturing locations, and design changes on product sustainability performance by integrating PD information and manufacturing analysis methods during the PD phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current age is one in dire need of teaching engineers of all branches about sustainability. The principle is that engineering choices have to be decided in the framework of constraints related to energy and materials and decreasing wastes. The federal government would be the most appropriate entity to take actions to drive the burgeoning of sustainable energy technologies. Coal is the most popular fuel globally used with the Rankine cycle for electric power generation. Most of the electric power produced in the world is generated via the Rankine cycle. One of the most efficient simple thermodynamic cycles for electric power generation currently is the gas cycle using natural gas, with the additional potential to decouple the energy sector from the water sector. The combined gas and Rankine cycle is an even more efficient cycle to generate electric power, but then couples the energy sector again to the water sector. Carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas with the longest half-life, is still produced with the gas turbine cycle, but to a lesser degree than the Rankine cycle using coal. The main components of the sustainability aspects of the energy sector are outlined. A number of themes related to sustainability in the energy sector are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]