Fermentation, Centrifugation, Distillation, and Control Experiments for a Chemical Engineering Laboratory

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Equipment and instrumentation necessary to implement experiments in fermentation, centrifugation, distillation, and control into a senior-level chemical engineering laboratory are provided. The equipment will mimic the major unit operations in the regionally important industry of fermentation of agricultural products to produce ethanol as a gasoline additive. The four major pieces of equipment are: a bench scale stirred-tank bioreactor (fermenter), a bench scale continuous centrifuge, an eight-tray bubble-cap distillation column, and the data acquisition instrumentation and microcomputers used to monitor and control the distillation column. Currently, there is significant industrial interest in the application of chemical engineering principles to biotechnological processes. Also, with the advent of the microcomputer, new supervisory control algorithms and data acquisition systems are being developed and used by industry. The equipment will allow the students to gain important hands-on experience in both of these significant areas of chemical engineering.