Chemical Engineering's Unit Operations Lab

We're in the Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Lab, which is to test what you've learned in all of your chemical engineering classes and apply the different unit operations you've learned about such as heat exchange, process control, separations, reactor design, and see them actually happening and how the theory applies and works out in real experimentation. It's a required course for the chemical engineering degree. It's actually our only laboratory course. They're going to do six experiments over the course of about four, four and a half weeks, but it's very, very time intensive, and so what they're doing is they're devoting pretty much 40 hours a week, either they're working in the lab itself or they're writing up the lab reports or preparing for the next lab. So it is equivalent to a full time job. It does prepare you for kind of the workload, I would say, of having to bounce between different projects because you're not going to stick with one, you'll look at multiple. The best part is the fact that what I learned in class, what I saw on paper, now I have like equipment, machines, that I can go, collect real world data, and then take the theory, which is the model and apply to the real world and see how consistent the theory is. We've got six groups running right now, so we've got six different experiments. Students have been introduced to the equipment, but now they're actually trying to figure out how to operate it. So in the morning, they come in and they try to figure out how to turn it on and get everything to work. And by this point in time in the afternoon, they've actually kind of figured out what they're doing. And so now they're actually doing some nice data collection. So the lab we're currently working on is the ammonia stripping column. So we're trying to strip ammonia gas from a weak ammonium hydroxide solution. In the real world, ammonia stripping is commonly used for wastewater treatment. The key thing that I think is really important here is that they work together as a team. They divide up the projects that they're working on, good time management, and that they develop oral and written communication skills. Companies that hire our graduates know that our students can do the equations. What they really want to see is, do they have those professional skills? And so we try to emphasize those at the same time.