(243d) Senior Design At UC Irvine: Process Development and Economics Analysis with PRO/II

Industrial standardized simulator PRO/II is applied in UC Irvine senior design class. Students are explore to real time simulation and project design assignments.

With fundamental knowledge of process design and economic analysis learnt from classroom, students get to develop projects by literature searching, PRO/II flow-sheet exercising, data reconciliation, and high-level process optimization from economic and environmental consideration.

Students were also stimulated by choosing their own projects reviewed by instructor. Interesting ones including generation of long-chain hydrocarbon (as fuel easy to store and transport) from natural gas, bio-energy generation from grass, supercritical CO2 decaffeination, sulfuric acid production from SO2, alcohol fermentation from potato (sugar) ... From which practice of fundamental engineering and economic understanding were encouraged.

With all the activities, popular topics such as

1. Azeotropic distillation

2. process optimization by controlling of design variables

3. economic model analysis such as Pareto optimal with engineering invest vs. environmental impact

were also emphasized as key portion of the design projects. Some of these topics, such as Pareto optimal, exceeded undergraduate level. However, basic knowledge of such topics were well understood with reasonable scale of exercise directly connected with projects chosen by the students.