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Enhancing creativity is an indispensable goal of many engineering courses. However, with flourishment of global collaboration in various engineering classrooms and best educational practices being replicated across cultures, there are not many curriculum interventions that originate from students' diverse cultural needs. When cultural differences are ignored, students may get culturally biased grades and face confusion and difficulties. For instance, the notion of "disruption" and "breakthrough" in product design innovation is culturally and locally shaped in the U.S. and might be considered undesirable in Japan. For example, Japanese students coming to a U.S. university for a co-final presentation with their U.S. student partners may get ill-evaluated due to lack of articulation on how their ideas break through the status quo. This is problematic given that student evaluation is less based on traditional exams of fundamental science knowledge, but rather increasingly subject to culturally-shaped experience.The paper is centered around the idea that engineers are motivated by the cultural values with which they identify. In the U.S., the motivation to promote change is widely held to underpin the generation of new ideas and value creation. In contrast, preservation is perceived as demanding but taken very seriously in Japan and change from this perspective can be seen as an unconstrained, irresponsible mission that requires less effort.The paper empirically examines the cultural dimensions of creativity in engineering education, specifically how engineering students' motivations for creative problem-solving are different in the U.S. than in Japan. A cross-cultural survey study was designed and run to test the hypothesis that Japanese (U.S.) engineers are more (less) motivated to create new ideas when they are asked to preserve rather than change something. We will share the encouraging preliminary results and discuss implications. Engineers across different cultures have the capacity of both -create to change, and create to preserve. But different cultures emphasize different values. If engineering educators (and managers at organizations) of a certain sociocultural context celebrate their cultural values and restrict others, either consciously or not, this would put people with different values at disadvantage. With the salient power dynamics between educators (managers) and students (junior employees), this means alienation, misjudgment and disconnection. The paper underlies the importance for educators to learn about the different cultural forces behind different engineering behaviors. The research contributes to the cross-cultural literature of engineering education.

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Open refrigerated display cabinets (ORDCs) suffer alterations of their thermal behaviour and of its performance due to variations of ambient air conditions (air temperature, relative humidity and velocity magnitude and orientation). Some factors interfere and affect the re-circulated air curtain behaviour and thus the equipment’s overall thermal performance. Examples of these factors are the location of air conditioning system discharge grilles, air mass flows originated by pressure differences due to openings to surroundings, and ambient air flow instabilities due to consumers’ passage nearby the frontal opening of the display cabinet, among others. This work performs a three-dimensional (3D) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling of air flow and heat transfer in an ORDC. The influence of ambient air velocity orientation in performance of the re-circulated air curtain is evaluated. A CFD parametric study is developed considering the ambient air orientation parallel, oblique and perpendicular to the frontal opening plane of the equipment. The 3D effects of ambient air velocity orientation are determined through the analysis of air temperature and velocity inside the equipment as well as along and across the air curtain. The longitudinal air flow oscillations and length extremity effects are analyzed, having a considerable influence in the overall thermal performance of the equipment. Experimental tests following EN-ISO Standard 23953 were conducted for climatic class n.er 3 (Tamb = 25 °C, φamb = 60%) in order to characterize the phenomena near inlets, outlets and physical borders. Moreover, experimental data is used to prescribe boundary conditions as well as to validate numerical predictions of temperature and velocity distributions.