Through the International Experience Program at Washington University in St. Louis, undergraduate students gain real-life and classroom experiences focusing on the difficult energy decisions countries must make.
This unique program takes students to another country during the summer to study energy and environmental technology and policy in a very different context from the United States. The program, now in its fifth year, is offered by the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering.
Students attend pre-trip orientation meetings and lectures in the spring and then take a fall class in which they analyze the experience, engaging in projects, discussions and presentations.
This year’s participants traveled to Campinas, a large city in southeastern Brazil, to study biofuels, says Ruth Chen, PhD, professor of practice in chemical engineering and program director. Yinjie Tang, PhD, and Venkat Subramanian, PhD, assistant and associate professors, respectively, in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, also traveled with the students.
In addition to 18 WUSTL undergraduates, 10 students from other universities had an opportunity to go on the trip as part of the National Science Foundation’s program Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU).
“Engineering is so much more than just solving problems and performing calculations,” says Brittany Radke, a junior at the University Nevada, Las Vegas, who participated in the program as a REU student.“It requires an understanding of different cultures and world views as well. Washington University acknowledges this through its International Experience, and I’m so thankful I was able to participate in this one-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity.”
Brazil is considered to have the world’s first sustainable biofuels economy, an economy based on the ethanol it makes from sugarcane and corn.
In 2007, the government mandated a fuel blend that contains 25 percent ethanol, and pure gasoline no longer is sold in the country. Because of poor sugarcane harvests, the blend has since been allowed to vary somewhat, a flexibility made possible by the introduction of flex-fuel cars that can run on a various blend of ethanol and gasoline.
Corn ethanol has a low “energy balance,” meaning it sometimes requires more energy to produce than it contains. Sugarcane is much more efficient; sugarcane ethanol has an energy balance seven times greater than corn ethanol. One reason is that the fibrous matter left after the stalks are crushed to extract their juice for sugar and ethanol production is used to fuel boilers in the process stream.
During the International Experience, the students studied biofuel production and Brazilian biofuel policy with the faculty of the chemical engineering department at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), the top chemical engineering department in the country.