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Bass Connections Goes to Detroit

Team takes classroom learning to General Motors to improve a plant's energy efficiency

How energy efficient is the automotive industry? With all of the attention focused on improving auto gas mileage, a team of Bass Connections faculty and students spent the past year working with an auto giant to look at energy use in its production facilities.

The Bass Connections team's research will help General Motor assess and problem solve around energy usage at an automotive manufacturing plant. The team visited the assembly plant in Michigan as part of their research on how weather impacts the energy use in the manufacturing process, specifically, the painting process, which is extremely energy intensive, and it became a focal point for their analysis. 

The above video depicts the Bass Connection's approach of having faculty, graduate students and undergraduates collaborate on interdisciplinary learning that can be applied to large real-world problems. In this case, not only do students receive a rewarding educational experience, but they get to see the translation of learning into relevant solutions.

Read more about the project on the students' blog here.