A Laboratory Course to Teach Chemical Manufacturing

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Two critical issues that dominate planning, growth, and success of the chemical manufacturing industry are product quality and the environment. Traditional undergraduate chemical engineering education emphasizes fundamentals, but consideration of the over-reaching manufacturing issues of product quality and environmentally conscious chemical manufacturing has not been integrated into the curriculum. This project provides an interrelated series of experiments centered upon manufacturing and evaluating the quality of a familiar chemical product, namely poly(methyl methacrylate). These experiments can be incorporated into a 2-semester unit operations laboratory sequence. This project continues to employ the existing, highly successful paradigm of teaching science and engineering fundamentals. At the same time, it allows for the integration of the principles of product quality and environmental accountability into the laboratory. Furthermore, this project improves several other required and elective lecture courses, as short teaching modules based on the experiments can be disseminated into those courses, providing continual reinforcement of the fundamentals of chemical manufacturing throughout several semesters of undergraduate education. This project is located in the Department of Chemical Engineering but can affect other disciplines, most notably Mechanical Engineering, by offering elements of these experiments and the teaching modules through interdisciplinary electives and the South Carolina Honors College.