An Experimental Design Approach to Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Laboratories

Abstract

This paper describes a strategy used to improve the learning process of a senior level undergraduate chemical engineering unit operations laboratory course. Course lectures cover experimental design, applied statistics, fundamental measurement principles and the basics of instrumentation. Students are asked to devise and carry out their own experiments to evaluate the performance characteristics of a particular unit operation and associated equipment, to critically analyse the results of the experiments and to properly report such results. Experimental work is not limited to performing a parametric study and, depending on the unit, students are asked to variously determine optimal processing conditions for given product specifications, evaluate the stability of the unit to processing perturbations, use data to propose kinetic and hydrodynamic models, and propose approaches for the scale up of the unit. As a result students were exposed to a more industrially relevant plant performance test integrating design of experiments material. The results after 6 years are discussed.