Education for Chemical Engineers最新文献

Process safety is a fundamental part of chemical engineering education and a key learning outcome to prepare generations of responsible and well-rounded engineers for the industry. The lack of courses and methodologies to prepare students with essential process safety training limits their consciousness about accident causes and prevention. It potentially leads to catastrophic and financially devastating events during professional practice. In this work, it was carried out a proposal for teaching process safety embedded within the chemical engineering program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. The approach to teaching safety was defined as a disseminated curriculum, which consists of establishing a transversal axis of process safety, which includes different learning experiences distributed in key courses of the current curriculum, beginning from the first semester, and concluding in the capstone project as the major design experience. The teaching staff prepared a list of topics and detailed experiences to develop classroom activities and tasks on process safety. Therefore, the implementation was branded as “The moment of safety” to set a culture within the academic community and future engineers. In this work, two surveys were conducted to assess faculty members' perceptions. According to the survey findings, around 81.8 % of the students indicated a level of expectation between high and very high, and 93.9 % valued the methodology proposed for the program as correct. More than 88 % of faculty members evaluate the proposal as appropriate or very appropriate, and 70 % recommend the formulation of a new ABET student outcome for the program related to process safety. These findings emphasize the significance of continuing to work through curricula to build a long-term process safety culture.

This work describes current teaching methodologies applied in the Unit Operations Laboratories (UOL) at the National University of Colombia (UNAL) Bogota campus, with emphasis in the capstone course of Laboratory of Separations, Reactions and Control Operations (LSRCO). This class is carried out using a wide variety of pilot and bench scale equipment within a ∼ 1000 m² laboratory facilities. The description of the course includes the context where it was developed, its goals and the intended student outcomes. Problem-based methodologies deployed during laboratory sessions are described, and required preparatory and final reporting materials together with examples of projects conceived and developed by students are described. The lasts are related to process control, separations, reaction engineering and entire process design problems. Additionally, course evaluation and grading scheme is presented including student surveys and final grades from recent semesters. Finally, tools, rubrics and results from the assessment of ABET’s student outcomes are summarized. Based upon the obtained results, it was observed that the working and evaluation methodologies have been well received by students, and besides improving technical competences, those have been effective to enhance their core skills and to promote the development of a research and entrepreneurial attitude.

In Colombia there are few chemical engineering programs and those have been historically linked to the industrial development of the country, supporting the training needs for industrial development in several regions of economic importance. The southwestern Colombian region contributes with the largest industrial production in the country, and the chemical engineering program of Universidad del Valle has been the only one in the region for 78 years. The last curriculum reform took place 20 years ago and the accelerated technological change urged the adoption of deep changes in the curriculum structure. A student-centered constructivist approach was applied in the faculty-wide transformation in the mesocurriculum and microcurriculum levels, defining the so-called Sensitivities, Capacities and Competencies (SCCs) as the set of attitudes, skills and knowledge necessary for an integral performance of engineers. Those were considered from two standpoints: general and disciplinary formation. In the disciplinary level, the historic traditional pillars of chemical engineering were maintained, but taking advantage on the areas of academic research, development and innovation (R+D+I) expertise demanded by the industry around the university in addition to transversal priority areas for modern chemical engineering professionals. This contribution discussed the elements of the curriculum reform for modernizing the chemical engineering curriculum of a high-impact program in a stablished university with a regional vocation.

Contemporary societal challenges put in evidence the need to improve the hard and soft skills of chemical engineering students. To promote a more student-centered approach, active-based learning, and improved assessment strategies, the Brazilian government approved the so-called New National Curriculum Guidelines (NCG) for engineering courses. To comply with those guidelines, the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (USP) is currently developing an educational modernization process sponsored by the Fulbright Commission in Brazil, called Special Program for Modernization of Undergraduate Education (PMG). The project is based on three pillars of modernization: content (what), form (how), and infrastructure (where). This paper describes initiatives in each of those pillars: content and format changes in Chemical Reaction Engineering and Process Safety courses and the creation of new spaces for a student-centered approach (an innovative classroom layout and a makerspace). By gathering two concrete classroom experiences guided by a broader institutional educational policies (the PMG project and the NCG), this paper highlights that slight changes can lead to great improvements in the learning process, leading to more engagement in the development of hard skills while favoring improvements in soft skills, such as communication, team-based work, and critical thinking.

Engineering education is being called upon to move to a student-centered teaching. New challenges demand a curriculum that considers a set of competencies to enable engineers to learn autonomously and to develop solid technical and relevant soft skills. We present a top-down methodology for developing a competency-based curricula, which was employed to conceive a new chemical engineering curriculum at the University of Campinas. Our methodology is based on four main steps: i) definition of the desired profile of students with a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and their underlying competencies; ii) delineation of learning-experiences itineraries; iii) a macro conception of the curriculum entailing the logical-temporal arrangement of its learning-experiences itineraries; and the iv) establishment of each curricular component with its learning objectives. This new curriculum is integrated into the external society by experiences that engage students to practice social responsibility and develop technology based on the needs of society. Graduates’ profile and competencies were defined based on extensive surveys. We discuss how active learning methodologies can be an intrinsic part of the curriculum development process and how assessment strategies must fit the learning goals established for each curricular component. Finally, we discuss the current challenges of implementing and evaluating a competency-based curriculum.

This paper describes a practical case study on the benefits and feasibility of a virtual laboratory as a part of chemistry laboratory exercises. Three different objectives that must fit together to create an efficient Virtual Reality (VR) learning experience were found: relevant information content, learning design, and technical feasibility. To achieve these multidisciplinary goals, a simple framework for designing VR learning materials was created. A 360-VR version of a chemistry laboratory exercise was designed and created following this framework. Data on its effectiveness was collected on a laboratory course with over 150 first-year chemical engineering students. The students completed the same laboratory exercise both as a virtual laboratory and in a real student laboratory. In the student feedback, students clearly stated that virtual laboratories cannot replace the experience in a real laboratory, and that the virtual laboratory exercises did not directly increase student motivation. Nevertheless, students showed a very positive attitude towards virtual learning materials and suggested including even more activating materials such as quizzes and interactive videos in the learning materials. Only a few students reported any downsides related to the virtual laboratory exercise. Overall, it was shown that our design principles work in practice as the students reported several real benefits when they completed a virtual laboratory exercise before the real-life laboratory exercise. These benefits included learning the correct way that the laboratory exercise proceeds and how to perform certain tasks correctly.

Jupyter Notebook (JN) is an example of an innovative and efficient digital tool that can be used effectively in higher education. In this work, a set of JNs was developed and implemented in the module “Chemical Processes” of the Master’s in Industrial Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) to strengthen key Chemical Engineering concepts and enhance the learning process of students. Specifically, five interactive JN activities related to mass balances, reactor design, and separation operations (i.e., distillation, absorption, and extraction) were created, including a set of self-assessment tests to measure the effect of this tool on the knowledge and understanding of students. In addition, the final grades obtained by the students were used to evaluate the impact of the interactive activities proposed in the learning process. Finally, the opinions of the students were collected through an anonymous questionnaire containing closed and open questions. The results obtained are discussed in terms of numerical indicators and student feedback to assess overall performance and engagement. In summary, this innovative teaching approach based on JN was considered a successful initiative to promote student motivation and learning experience in Chemical Engineering-related modules.

In 2020, the Conference of Chemical Engineering Directors and Deans (CODDIQ) proposed the creation of an observatory to monitor chemical engineering degrees in Spain. This representative radiography of Chemical Engineering studies offers an initial point to observe the future changes when Royal Decree 822/2021 and proposed challenges in the last Ministerial Conference on the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) will be implanted. The survey data from CODDIQ partners allow us to know important data such as (i) the 24 international quality accreditations at Spanish universities, (ii) the high demand and the required marks, an average of 7.25, for the Chemical Engineering Bachelor’s degree, (iii) 9560 undergraduate students in this degree in Spain and their gender profile which is around 43% of women, similar than women lectures, (iv) the difficulty of this Bachelor’s degree through some indicators like duration of studies (5.25 years), graduation rate (41%) and drop-out rate (26%), (v) the employability after obtaining the Bachelor's degree is very high (>70%). In addition, Chemical engineering undergraduate and graduate students indicate their expectations are covered. In this paper, some consequences of the pandemic on students' performance (lower than before COVID-19) are analyzed, despite lectures tried to innovate in their classes and the university provided adequate tools for online teaching.

Since emerging more than a century ago, petroleum engineering (PE) education has increasingly kept its popularity despite significant downturns in the industry. During these downturn periods, observed at least four times since the 1973 oil crisis, structural changes in university programs have been considered. While experiencing the fifth downturn period over the last five decades, it is time again to ask the same question: “Shall we continue with the same PE education model or radically shift to a new model?” In this paper, after reviewing more than fifty articles published over the last 85 years reporting the attempts made towards reshaping PE education, an option of restructuring PE programs is discussed. This option is less oil industry (and oil prices) dependent and more of a “general” engineering education program with an emphasis on the “geoscience” or “subsurface” engineering aspects of the PE discipline. The viability of the proposed program was discussed from industry, academia, and students’ perspective. Fundamentals are essential in this new program similar to other general (or major) engineering disciplines such as mechanical, civil, chemical, and electrical engineering. The critical elements of engineering skills such as creative design, decision making, problem description and solving, management under high degree of uncertainty, and data collection and processing for optimization are to be included in the new model.