Integrated Chemical Engineering & Industrial Outreach - A New Approach to Design and Chemical Engineering Practice

LINNINGER, Andreas A. & BAHL, Vishal

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois, Chicago. Chicago, IL 60607, U.S.A., linninge@uic.edu, vbahl1@uic.edu

Abstract: A new type of chemical engineering senior design course sequence is presented. The instructional framework of the senior design education takes an integrated view of chemical engineering sciences and focuses on problem solving skills in a team-oriented collaborative fashion. New responsibilities such as pollution prevention as well as consideration of health and safety related aspects are fostered by a dual advisement system:

Keywords: Senior design education, decision-making, methodological process development

1 Introduction

There is an emerging and growing need to revamp engineering education and to provide students with the skills and attitudes needed to make and justify engineering decisions in support of business in a competitive global marketplace. Among these novel skills that are articulated alongside traditional academic standards are:

• Versatility of students to excel in open-ended problem situations.
• Awareness and skill in managing available resources such as time and project funds.
• Capability of team collaboration.
• Familiarity with a variety of new decision support tools, e.g. novel design software, systematic process synthesis methodologies.

These recent developments require a qualitative adaptation of the senior design education. This has been recognized by many school in the country such as MIT [MIT 1997] or University of Massachussetts at Amherst [UMass 1995] to name only a few. The proposed innovation for the chemical engineering senior design education has two main foci: (i) refinement of the integrative application of all chemical engineering skills and (ii) establishment of an industrial perspective before graduation.

The proposed innovation for the chemical engineering senior design education foresees the following two segments: (i) Integrated Chemical Engineering I - Methodology focuses on decision-making for the development of environmentally sound processes. (ii) Integrated Chemical Engineering II – Industrial Practice challenges students to apply their entire undergraduate knowledge in an open-ended research project of industrial relevance. The following chapter describes in detail methodology, technical content and results of the first course. The discussion will also contain lessons learned from two prototypical courses of this course at the University of Illinois in the academic years 1998-1999. Section 3 will describe briefly the concept for the second segment for the senior design education.

2 Integrated Chemical Engineering – Methodology (Senior Design I Che 396)

Many traditional design courses involve the search for a process flowsheet from the open literature. With knowledge of the main process steps, the students’ task include the computations for the mass and energy balances for equipment allocation and sizing as well as estimation of associated annualized capital and operating cost. Then a detailed process flow diagram (PFD), sometimes down to details such as technical drawings of the major equipment, e.g. columns or heat exchangers, are generated by each team.

2.1 Objective and Methodology

In the proposed course, a completely orthogonal approach was undertaken. The objective was to invent a conceptual process flowsheet for the production of a chemical product. Within 15 weeks, students had to deliver a preliminary feasibility study for the in-house production of acetic anhydride at an imagined production site versus purchasing it on the open market. This meant to develop a novel process with knowledge of the chemical reaction only. The authors feel that this starting point is more realistic for chemical engineering process development than the classical approach. The final result was a conceptual flowsheet as well as a tree of possible alternatives.

Preliminary process design belongs to the group of open-ended problems. These problems exhibit plentiful degrees of freedom and are therefore qualified as underdefined. In those situations, practicing engineers are challenged to take decisions with limited amount of time and resources available. Typically 80% of a final design cost are fixed in the early conceptual design phase.

In consequence, emphasis was given to the application and refinement of decision-making skills that are indispensable for open-ended design problems. The students design projects evolved systematically using the hierarchical process design approach by Douglas [1988]. The decision-making proceeds through four phases with increasing level of details. Each phase fixes relevant design aspects while suppressing minor details for later phases. The Douglas methodology traverses through the following major decisions:

• Production mode, i.e. batch or continuous.
• Number and composition of the raw material and product streams, i.e. Input-Output Structure.
• Configuration and operating parameters for the reaction network – Recycle Structure.
• Units and operation conditions for the separation system – Separation System.
• Heat integration

The driving force for the screening of conceptual process flowsheets is the dominant cost estimates. It is crucial to recognize that technological decisions at each of these consecutive layers are motivated by economic incentives.

2.2 Course Organization and Technical Content

The entire course was projected into a professional business environment. Students in teams of three or four constituted a project team. The different teams participated in an open bidding contest for a process to produce acetic anhydride in specified quantity and purity. The teams were asked to give themselves and their project a name, e.g. Alpha Team. We believe that this ”corporate” identity builds confidence in the significance of their concerted effort and helped to distinguish themselves from the other teams that mimicked their business competitors. The students reported to a chief engineer represented by the instructor via four progress reports. The students managed their group meetings as well as external consultations. For consultations the students could hire two experienced engineers portrayed by the instructor and his teaching assistant. As with other resources like the students’ working time the expenditure for the consultations had to be budgeted by the project teams.

Table 1 shows the first problem statement. The enclosures included physical properties that are readily available in the literature. A reaction network for acetic anhydride was chosen for which no actual production plant exists. Reaction mechanism and details on the technical aspects for acetic anhydride production can be found in [McKetta, 1976]. It is important to highlight the following issues in the problem formulation:

• A business language was used while avoiding any similarity to homework assignments.
• Some addition general information is provided, but specifics of how to address the problem are left to the designers.
• The scope of the project is implicitly defined by the time and resources available.

2.3 Results

The development of the projects progressed through four intermediate stages. At each phase the students submit a preliminary report in response to memos such as depicted in Table 1. This step by step approach is necessary to safeguard that weaker teams can also evolve to a methodical working style. The instructor’s lecture guided the otherwise independent evolution of the students’ project. Clearly, such guidance is only warranted in the first of the two design courses. Table 2 lists the different project phases. It also summarizes the different levels of feedback and evaluation students receive in their senior design work. More details including the syllabus and a course schedule can be found at our teaching web site [WEB, 1999].

As an example for the economic trade-off that students needed to address consider Fig. 1. It depicts the economic potential of the recycle structure as a function of the reaction conversion. It becomes clear that the process has to be operated at the conversion between 10% to 14% since this range provides the highest economic incentive. Similar considerations motivate the preferences of the main process steps and strengthen the students’ awareness of the interaction between process economics and technical design decisions. Extension of the design methodology to include ecological considerations alongside purely economical ones are overlapping research areas such as discussed in [Linninger 1998, 1999]. Fig. 2 shows the final economic potentials as developed by seven senior design teams of fall ’98. Note that the initial large variations in the projections disappear as students sharpen their projects against their competition or eliminate shortcomings including computational errors. Intermediate results such as the budgets, i.e. personal costs, as well as expected economic potential were made visible to all teams at each phase to encourage open competition.

Table 1 – First Memo specifying the overall problem task

Table 2 – Phases of the Senior Design Course - I

Fig. 1 – Economic Potential versus Conversion

Fig. 2 – Economic Potential for the Final Project

Amount and complexity of the computations made the use of symbolic numerical tools a prerequisite. Although computational tools such as MAPLE, MATLAB and HYSYS are not required, all teams resorted to the use of computers voluntarily by their final phases of the project. EXCEL was initially popular since most students had obtained experience in its use. As the computations became more involved, the numerical solution capabilities and insufficient debugging features diminished its usage by the student designers.

Industry often observes the lack of computational skills in newly graduates. Other voices ask for an increase for computational exposure in the undergraduate curriculum. It appears from our experience that it is not the amount of lectures that may need revision. As this experience seems to indicate, the incentive to use computers must be motivated by a proper problem task. As mentioned before, the adherence to some degree of automation and use of symbolic mathematical tools emerged purely form project efficiency considerations. The instructors merely prepared short introductory tutorials and provided limited technical assistance. The evolution of the skills was strictly left to the students. Incentive may have been sparked by the dynamics of the open class competition. Voluntary extensions of the projects were encouraged and culminated in the publication of research paper on symbolic/numeric computation in the process design by the Alpha Team [Richardson, 1999].

Table 3 - Grading Table

The feedback/grades for each phase emphasized strongly on writing style. In the authors’ opinion, report organization and writing style are paramount for the students’ professional development. Initial content and organization significantly influenced the intermediate evaluations, see Table 3. To balance highest technical quality with the need to develop and refine technical writing skills increasing importance was given to accuracy of the result. The advanced reports weighed heavier than the earlier documents. Note also that the final grade on the first segment of this course was based on the following key:

• a process design project (75%)
• class participation (10%)
• participation in industrial workshops (10%)
• Team Presentations (5%).

The final project reports were written in form of a feasibility study as used by technical consultants or corporate process designers. Copies of final reports [AAA, 1998; AlphaTeam, 1998] can be obtained by interested instructors upon written request to the principal author.

Fig. 3 summarizes the total project budget deployed by the design teams. Typically 350 to 800 working hours were invested in the study. These figures give rise to 5 to 10 hours per team member per week. There was evidence that more effort did not necessarily correlate with better grades. In our experience, the project budget can be used to assess the teams’ organization skills. Excessive budget sometimes indicates frictions in the teams effort or lack of delegation. It is conceivable to limit the available budget so as to create a more realistic market situation. We have so far not experienced with this idea for the following reasons:

• The ongoing semester work automatically constraints the student’s time.
• Some teams may consume their project budget early. Then they would sit idle for the remainder of the course or get disqualified without any further learning effect.
• A budget constraint is hard to supervise and may prompt dishonesty.

Fig. 3 – Total Engineering cost for the Project

3 Industrial Outreach

Four to five industrial researchers constitute a panel of the Industrial Outreach Program. The outreach partners complement the academic agenda conducted by the faculty instructor. Table 4 recognizes the individuals and the corporations that have supported the first and second industrial outreach program. In one-day workshops, a typical visit to the senior design class is organized as follows:

• Presentation of corporate profile and background of the visitor.
• Technical presentation on a current research and development problem.
• Individual interviews of senior design student with questions related to the technical talk, the chemical engineering practice and the professional development opportunities for the students in the particular corporation.

Industrial ‘Coaches’ also provided feedback concerning (i) the student teams in terms of their professionalism and (ii) evaluation of select design projects and (iii) course format and accomplishment were discussed with the instructor.

Table 4 – Participants in the First and Second Industrial Outreach Program

In addition to the Industrial Outreach Panel, the UIC’s School of Engineering headed by Dean Lawrence Kennedy hosts an annual competition of all senior design projects. In an one-day event organized as a trade fair or technical exposition, all senior design teams from the departments of electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical, civil, biochemical and chemical engineering displayed their senior design work to industrial as well as academic judges. The projects were grouped into distinct categories such as air pollution prevention technologies, process design, consumer goods, etc. The winners were determined on technical merit, originality and overall quality of the presentation based on evaluations from the professional and professorial judges [EXPO 1998]. This competition constitutes a valuable forum for presenting the technical aspects of the senior design projects in oral form and to non-expert audience. Clearly, these expositions demand high organizational and verbal skills from the student contestants. An interesting trend could be observed. The exposition of their work to a public audience including peers triggered a much higher creativity and effort that a course with grade reward could do.

4 Integrated Chemical Engineering – Industrial Practice (Senior Design II - Che 397)

After the methodology and guidance offered in the first segment, the second project aims at innovative solutions to real-world chemical engineering problems. The industrial sponsors draw the problem topics from their current industrial interest. These projects should be open-ended and involve research work of moderate to medium difficulty. A set of three to four projects is available for students’ selection. Typically, two competing teams work on the same project in order to improve quality and secure results for the benefit of the industrial sponsor.

This second segment does not require lectures, but is conducted as research under dual supervision by the faculty advisor and the industrial co-advisors. Contact with the corporation can be organized on a case to case basis, but involves a commitment of at least two trips to the company, weekly email or phone contact and a final presentation at the corporation. Space limitations do not allow for a more thorough discussion.

Conclusions and Significance

An instructional framework for the senior design education of chemical engineering students at the University of Illinois at Chicago was presented. The approach emphasizes on decision-making skills in open-ended design problems. The creative evolution of alternative processing schemes is stimulated by the emulation of a competitive corporate environment. For this purpose, design task, its supervision as well as project execution are transposed into a professional setting. Industrial input is further accentuated through a panel of four Industrial Outreach partners. The project results are documented following the format of technical writing style used by consultant or corporate design teams. In addition, the student design teams defend their project at an open poster competition in front of industrial and academic judges. The new focus and the professional format of the senior design education effected very positively other important areas of the curriculum such as the refinement of computer skills and applied mathematics. In summary, a more intense level of students’ identification and professionalism of the graduating engineers could be observed.

Acknowledgements

The principal author wants to thank Professors George Stephanopoulos, MIT, as well as James Douglas, Michael Doherty and Michael Malone, UMass, whose instructional materials and discussions were instrumental in developing the proposed course. Financial support from the UIC – 99’CETL Grant and support from the the Department of Chemical Engineering at UIC is also gratefully acknowledged.

References

[AAA, 1998] K. Li, F. Khan, C. Gonzales, Acetic Anhydride Production, Preliminary Economic Evaluation, UIC, 1998.

[AlphaTeam 1998] Richardson, C.; Sopher, S.; Petak, R., Patel, A.; Preliminary Evaluation of the Manufacture of Acetic Anhydride, UIC, 1998.

[EXPO 1998] The UIC Engineering EXPO, School of Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998.

[Douglas, 1988] Douglas, J. M., Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes, McGraw-Hill, USA (1988).

[Linninger, 1998] Linninger, A. A. and G. Stephanopoulos; ”A Natural Language Approach for the Design of Batch Operating Procedures”, Informatica, Special Issue on Natural Language Processing and Multi-Agent Systems, Vol 22, 4, ISSN 0250-5596, 1998.

[Linninger, 1999] Linninger A. A; Chakraborty, A.; ”Synthesis and Optimization of Waste Treatment Flowsheets”, Submitted to Computers and Chemical Engineering (1999).

[McKetta, 1976] McKetta. J.; Encyclopedia of Chemical Processing and Design, Vol. 1, Dekker, New York, p 271, 1976.

[MIT 1997] MIT Bulletin ‘97-‘98, Integrated Chemical Engineering, pp 146, 1997.

[Richardson, 1999] Richardson, Christina; Sopher, Susan; Petak, Robert and Andreas A. Linninger; ”Conceptual Process Design using Symbolic and Numerical Computing Techniques”, MapleTech Journal, Special Issue on Industrial Mathematics, accepted 1999.

[UMass 1995] Decision-Making by Design – A new Curriculum for Chemical Engineers, GE Fund Proposal, University of Massachussets at Amherst, 1995.

[WEB, 1999] Homepage Laboratory for Product and Process Design, http://vienna.che.uic.edu, 1999.