CHEMICAL ENGINEERING UNIT OPERATIONS LABORATORY UPGRADES

Abstract

This project was done in order to make improvements to the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering’s lad space in the Harshbarger building. There were two parts to this project. The first part was to design, build and test a hydraulics friction loss experiment to be used in the senior year of the environmental engineering program. This lab was designed for students to compare the theoretical and experimental pressure drops across fittings, valves, and long pipes. There are three different 16-foot long pipes of varying diameters and pipe materials. There are several different fittings and valves including elbows, check, ball and globe valves.There are also two different flow visualization demonstrations including a cavitation demonstration and flow regime demonstration to show the difference between laminar and turbulent flow. The second part of this project was to design a new-cold water system to provide cooling water to experiments in the undergraduate lab space. This is due to the installation of a lift, so the lab space is accessible to all students.This new cold-water system includes a water holding tank, three different heat exchangers in parallel and various pumps. This process was modeled in ASPEN and the specifications were given to the department for future implementation.