Incorporating Experimental Design into the Unit Operations Laboratory

© Copyright ChE Division of ASEE 2003 Typically, the unit operations laboratory is one of the least-liked classes in the chemical engineering curriculum at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Unfortunately, many students view laboratory experiments as unfocused and haphazard investigations of various types of equipment that provide mere busy-work during their demanding course load. Although the concepts investigated are useful for all students, most of them think that the circumstances behind the investigations are not representative of those typically encountered in industry. In an attempt to provide the students with a more industrially meaningful experience when performing an experiment in this class, design-of-experiment (DOE) techniques have been combined with one classic unit operations experiment to present a more “real-world situation” to the student.