Internships

Miranda Marks ’13

This summer I worked with Professor Eric Larson (Princeton Environmental Institute) and Professor Sankaran Sundaresan (Chemical and Biological Engineering) to develop a new Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE) course to be offered in fall 2012. This course, titled “The Energy-Water Nexus,” is intended to teach students about the challenges surrounding the ever-increasing global consumption of energy and water, as well as the large overlap between these two areas. During this internship I researched current literature on global and regional energy and water challenges, alternative energy sources, desalination, and climate change; created problem sets that used engineering fundamentals to examine energy and water use in power plants; and learned and implemented the computer program Aspen Plus to simulate various power plant and desalination processes. I was able to gain an extensive background in the study of energy and water. This research ties directly to my senior thesis, in which I will use Aspen Plus to study water and energy use of an energy conversion plant.