(271b) Developing Hands-on Skills: Building a Gas Delivery System

Many chemical processing plants contains thousands of feet of pipes and tubing, therefore it is very useful for chemical engineering students to gain hands-on experience working with a variety of pipe and tube fittings. A three-week long hands-on session was implemented during a Junior-level Chemical Engineering Laboratory I course to develop student skills with lab hardware. During the first lab session, students learned how to identify different fittings, tubing, and pipes, along with how to size and name each piece. In the following lab session, students learned how to use wrenches properly to connect different fittings, and students learned how to create new pieces of tubing with nut-ferrule assemblies. Finally, in the last session, students used the tubing that they created during the previous session to build a gas delivery system. This last session culminated in a laboratory experiment that included pressurizing a system using a gas cylinder, testing the system for leaks, and determining a way to collect data from the system to calculate the volume of a small reactor. As a result, students not only learned hands-on skills, but they also applied these skills to create a gas delivery system to collect data to perform thermodynamic calculations. Students completed this lab session with a better sense of the work that goes into building a fluid flow network, and in future labs that involve more complex flow networks, students are better able to identify the different components of these systems.