ChE

Chemical Engineering (ChE)

Unit ops lab now rivals commercial facilities

Hancock Hall's undergraduate unit operations (UO) engineering laboratory operated by the chemical engineering (ChE) department is quiet through most of the school year. But it buzzes during the summer. It is then that dozens of rising seniors majoring in the field take an extensive six-week lab session that involves eight lab experiments.

The tasks — separating liquids or gases from one another, leeching gases off solids, and the like — are so extensive and time-consuming, department administrators moved the sessions to the summer so the experiments do not interfere with regular fall/spring class work.

But this summer, the lab could have been missing its centerpieces. Several months ago, one of the department's key pieces of lab equipment, a distillation column, ceased working, said John Walz, ChE professor and department head. It wasn't surprising, though. The piece of equipment — used to separate liquids, such as alcohol from water — was 17 years old. It was well past its prime and needed replacing.

Luckily, there was an easy and available answer to the problem. With income from the new engineering department fee collected during a two-year period, the sessions could go on using an updated distillation unit purchased for $130,000.

The unit was installed in early 2009 and was used for the first time this summer. It was tested this past May, just as the regular academic school year ended. “It's the most important piece of equipment our department uses,” Walz said. “The loss of the device and no replacement would have be a major setback for the department.”

Stephen Martin, an assistant professor within the department, added, “We now have a new, smaller, and more versatile distillation apparatus that will allow us to introduce a variety of new objectives, such as vacuum and azeotropic distillation, continuous distillation, and process control elements.”

“This is exactly what people in the chemical lab at commercial facilities would be using,” said Preston Durrill, an adjunct faculty member within the department. Along with other faculty members, Durrill heads up the summer sessions with planning lab experiments and supervising students as they work. He called the summer lab sessions vital.

“The UO lab is particularly important for our department as it is the only hands-on experience the students get during their careers at Virginia Tech — outside of internships and co-ops — and it allows them to apply the knowledge learned in the other core courses of the curriculum,” said Martin.

Some older equipment, perfectly usable and having undergone little change during the past few decades, also needs new piping, which the fee can provide for. “So much equipment is old. It requires replacement and/or maintenance so we can use fees for all of that,” Durrill said.

Among the newer major purchases is the $20,000 gas absorption lab unit, which can be used to separate gases from liquids. Durrill called it a commonly used piece of safety equipment in commercial labs across the country. “When fuel is used in a lab or work space, this thing can remove the vapor/fumes, so it is less volatile and dangerous.” Additional new equipment includes a reactions kinetics lab set-up and a controlling device that separates gases, such as oxygen and nitrogen in air.

“The fee has been vital to the department,” Walz said.