One Week Design Projects For Chemical Engineering Freshmen

Freshman chemical engineering students along with students from other engineering disciplines take a two credit Introduction to Engineering course in their first semester. The students are introduced to various topics including career options in various engineering fields, resume’ workshop, communication skills, ethics, intellectual property, problem solving, critical thinking and time management. Approximately 30-35% of the grade is based on homework, quizzes and exams, while 50% is based on a design & build project, and 15-20% on interdisciplinary and discipline-specific mini design projects. As the students have no formal training in engineering at this stage, the chemical engineering mini design projects are formulated to encourage students to relate the processes in their everyday life to unit operations and processes in chemical engineering. Areas in food processing such as meal preparation and fast food restaurant operation, and resource recovery and separation of mixtures have been used to introduce the concepts of flowsheet development, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, scale up, reactor operation and separation techniques. The students work in groups of three to four for about a week, and are required to make oral presentations and submit written reports for their projects. In this paper, examples of chemical engineering mini design projects and sample student solutions will be discussed. Background Most universities have an introductory course for freshman engineering students that introduces them to the language of engineering, problem solving techniques, and basic concepts and fundamentals of the discipline. These techniques and the basic knowledge would then be required for more challenging and complex engineering problems during the next four to five years of engineering education. We have found that creating a shell of the whole curriculum with a one to two week introduction of each topic, with an emphasis on design thread through them, creates a more engaging and interesting learning style from the student’s perspective. In the general engineering education part of this course, several mini design projects are assigned on a group basis. Since the students have no formal training in engineering at this stage and they certainly have not had any exposure to the theory and mathematical relationships involved, the mini design projects are formulated to encourage students to draw upon their everyday life experiences to develop simple flow sheets (block diagrams) involving unit operations and processes. The focus is to develop critical thinking skills in logical processing steps, coupled with simple mass and energy balances and economics. P ge 958.1 Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2004, American Society for Engineering Education Mini Design Examples Two examples of chemical engineering mini design projects are described below. In the first example, a mythical fruit, suntrango, with multiple components of great value, is described and the students were asked to propose continuous processes for separation of the components and use them as raw material for consumer products. Basic description of the fruit and some potential uses were suggested in the problem setup. The students took this information and produced detailed design reports, which contained very sophisticated engineering analysis based on reasonable assumptions, and extended the uses to other plausible products. In the second example, the students were asked to develop a continuous large-scale process for the production of their favorite food dish. Since the problem of preparing a food dish is very familiar, the students used the operations of cutting, mixing, heating, cooling, separating, etc., extensively in their processes. In the ensuing discussion, the concepts of fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, single phase and multiple phase systems, separation processes and reaction kinetics were easier to explain qualitatively, in simple terms. With reference to their flow sheets, they got a flavor (no pun intended) of what concepts would be used to size various units and the choices one can make in arriving at different designs for the same process.