CHEMICAL ENGINEERING UNIT OPERATIONS LABORATORY UPGRADES

Abstract

For the Chemical Engineering senior design project, the team was tasked with designing, building and testing a new hydraulics experiment for undergraduate students. The second part of the project was to design a new cold-waterp rocess for the laboratory space to provide cooling water to existing experiments. The hydraulics lab consists of 3 pipes,16 feet each varying in diameter and pipe material. Pressure sensors have been wired and connected to LabVIEW allowing students to see the pressure within the pipe in real time. Students will use their thermodynamics knowledge to calculate theoretical pressure drops in a system using the mechanical energy balance and compare the theoretical pressure drops to experimental ones. The existing cold-water process needed to be redesigned since the set up will be replaced due to the implementation of a lift system in the lab. The team redesigned the set up using ASPEN to satisfy the temperature and volumetric flow rate requirements of the experiments. The goal of the design was to use a tankless water system with three heat exchangers where each exchanger had the capacity to provide cooling water to any of the three existing experiments in the lab space. With the model, design engineers can implement the new heat exchangers as early as Summer 2020.