Have you ever wondered why rockets don’t melt when they take off? Or what about airplane engines, how do the blades survive combustion temperatures? Or maybe you’ve used a cast iron skillet and wondered how it was made? Welcome to Extreme Engineering! In this class, we’ll talk about how people design and manufacture things that are meant to be used at high temperatures. We’ll first motivate why certain applications require high temperatures. We’ll then introduce some different materials that are commonly used, explain why these materials are unique, and discuss how they react to heat and oxygen. Finally, we’ll explore some fun applications of high-temperature materials like rockets and nuclear reactors! Join us to learn about some hot topics in engineering.

As you may have learned in many classes, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to climate change. As engineers, our natural next thought is: how can we reduce CO2 emissions? It turns out that there are two major culprits: industrial processes and electric power generation. Through this class, you’ll understand why, and what we can do about it. For industry, we’ll learn about cement and steel manufacturing, how these produce CO2, and how we can adjust current processes. For power generation, we’ll discuss where our electricity currently comes from and how we can improve it. By the end, you’ll get an overview of both industrial decarbonization and power generation, and appreciate some of the technical underpinnings of both!

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges in human history. In recent years, it has become clear that our way of life is not 100% sustainable and that something needs to change. This course will introduce you to sustainability and the science behind it. We will cover a wide range of topics, including: climate change; electricity generation and its decarbonization; water scarcity and water harvesting; and the role of materials and their environmental impact. By the end of this course, you will have learned about the science underpinning these applications, including heat transfer, thermodynamics, mechanics, and materials science. More importantly, we hope you will walk away able to talk about sustainability and feeling inspired to create the changes necessary to make society more sustainable and save the world!

You may have learned about atoms in class - a nucleus of protons and neutrons with electrons whizzing around it. But did you know that with fancy microscopes you can actually take pictures of atoms? And once you have these pictures, you can go even further and actually model how these atoms interact! By knowing the forces between atoms, you can calculate how they move. This atomic scale motion can be used to predict large-scale properties, like heat conduction, cracking, and melting or boiling. If we zoom in even further, we can investigate electrons - but because they’re so tiny, quantum mechanics comes into play! It is very difficult to solve these equations, but making some approximations allows us to calculate electronic and optical properties, with applications in solar cells, computer chips, and many more! For example, these interactions can help us understand why glass is transparent. Hopefully, through this class you’ll gain an appreciation for the little things in life, and learn about why atoms matter!