Industrial Automation in Unit Operations Labs

Chemical engineering unit operation labs do an excellent job of integrating the whole curriculum and exposing students to pilot-scale systems. Where they are often lacking, though, is the exposure to and use of real-life industrial automation by the future graduates. A unit operation lab that has been automated using industrial level paradigms and equipment is the focus of this paper. A partnership with a global automation manufacturer (Emerson) was established and the lab was retrofitted using industrial sensors and actuators, a Distributed Control System (DeltaV DCS), industrial networks (FOUNDATION Fieldbus and AS-i), Human Machine Interface (HMI) screens, and system redundancy. The details of the automation along with its use through the lab curriculum will be discussed. This cross-curricular approach benefits students as, through the regular unit operation labs, they become familiar with key elements of an automated set-up, understand the need for it and its limitations, see control loops in action, communicate to the units through the HMI, and use the HMI to recover historical data on the processes. The lab is a meso-scale of a processing facility and prepares students for field work after graduation. At the same time, the traditional exposure to “manually operated” sensors and final elements is maintained as some of the units have not been converted to fully automated systems.