Educational Labs

The chemical engineering laboratories are used to reinforce the lecture material. Many students find that it is through "doing" that they first reach true understanding. Each laboratory topic is organized as a 3 week mini-project: the students study the equipment that is available and then plan out the scope of the investigations that they will undertake. They collect the experimental evidence that they require, make whatever calculations are necessary and write a formal report. They then present these findings to an audience of their peers and instructors. By the time that undergraduates take their first chemical engineering laboratory they will already have a strong background in experimentation gained through their science courses. Their first chemical engineering experiments concentrate on heat transfer, pumping, fluid flow and drying. In their second laboratory the emphasis changes to mass transfer, separation processes and reactor design so in this course their work is on gas and liquid diffusion, evaporation, liquid extraction, distillation and the performance of various chemical reactors.

The undergraduate chemical engineering laboratories house state-of-the art facilities and are furnished with top of the line equipments and instruments supplied by major laboratory equipment companies.A computer controlled, pilot plant distillation column is part of this second laboratory with effect from Fall 2008. A pilot plant distillation tower is custom made for the laboratory to study distillation phenomena and the associated mass transfer processes which is controlled by an industrial quality distributed control system. The laboratory sessions are realized through several practical exercises which enable experimental verification of the different theoretical concepts of fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer operations, process control dynamics and also chemical reaction kinetics.

Two laboratory courses (CHEN 414 and CHEN 433) are offered for that purpose.