UNIT Community

Because applied thermodynamics is traditionally a difficult subject for students, the educational challenges are numerous. The field is vast, with a great many tracks possible, and is likely to become even broader due to the interactions among the tracks and the growing complexity resulting from the need for greater efficiency.

Students must be able to handle harder problems than in the past, and they must do it more quickly and with less knowledge of mathematics.

With the successful new approach based on THERMOPTIM, the educational methods have been redesigned such that students no longer find thermodynamics intimidating. This is why THERMOPTIM is being used in more than a hundred educational institutions, including at least a dozen UNIT partners. It is an original, unrivalled approach that meets a concrete demand, as proved by the commercial distribution of the software.

The ALET Club (Software for Thermodynamics Education), composed of some twenty teachers, has been meeting since July 2000, and nearly 200 Grandes Écoles Preparatory School teachers have attended LIESSE training programs on THERMOPTIM. In early 2005, UNIT created a community to coordinate with the other groups.

The goal of the THERMOPTIM project in UNIT is to provide education not only in conventional energy systems, but also innovative, low environmental impact systems, which means that new educational resources must be developed. The UNIT community has shown considerable interest in this work, which has a direct impact on motivation among undergraduate and graduate students alike, and which is also of interest to industry.

Members

The members of the Thermoptim-UNIT Community are teachers in the field of energy. They all belong to UNIT partners. Most of them also belong to the ALET club.

It should be noticed that all UNIT partners may use freely the Thermoptim Classroom Education version. To get it, you only need to send an email to inscriptions-th@thermoptim.org.

(Please do not forget to specify your phone number and email address, as well as those of the UNIT partner you depend on).

Activities

The work program of the teachers' community was initiated in the year 2004 and will continue at least until 2008. The program is divided into several stages and activity reports:

• Stage 1: Development of components able to represent the UNIT operations relevant to process engineering and not exclusively to energetics.
• Stage 2: Development of new external classes and guidance pages for practical works to ease the work of teachers.
• Stage 3: Conception of the Thermoptim-UNIT portal, development of new guidance pages for practical works and coupling with an on-line course about global energy problems.

The generated resources will be included into the present portal and in the UNIT portal as soon as they are developed. For more information, please refer to the relevant activity reports.