The Unit Operations Laboratory

Welcome to the Unit Operations Laboratory of the Chemical Engineering Department. This laboratory, commonly referred to as the "Unit Ops", is designed to give you hands-on experience with pilot-scale equipment that represent several of the unit operations commonly found in the chemical process and related industries. We find that many of our graduates become involved in plant operations early in their careers and exposure to large processing equipment is educational. The Unit Ops Laboratory is also intended to reinforce the chemical engineering sciences, introduce design of experiments and treatment of data, introduce analytical tools, and practice reporting.

A mainstay in chemical engineering education for over 60 years, the unit ops lab has evolved in most departments in the U.S. to bench-scale experiments due to the cost of maintenance and operation and due to shorter equipment time constants. We have been able to maintain a pilot-scale lab, thanks in part to a generous gift in 1989 from the Dow Chemical Co. This gift allowed us to add automatic process control to our distillation columns and to build the process control room. In 1999, an endowment was established in the name of Professor Frank May for continual support of the laboratory. Dr. May was on our faculty from 1955 to 1994, and he was responsible for many improvements to the laboratory including the control upgrades. Through additional financial support from BP and Siemens, we have made significant improvements to the undergraduate laboratory, including a completely renovated Siemens control system for the distillation columns. Significant improvements are underway for other experiments as well, including the gas absorption experiment, and the fluid flow experiment. Thanks to these generous gifts, we have one of the few remaining pilot-scale labs in the U.S. The department is proud of its laboratory and we hope your experience in will significantly contribute to your education.

Currently, the lab instruction entails two classes, typically taken in sequential semesters. The first lab, Energy Transfer and Fluids, includes a Fluid Flow (FF) network, industrial pilot-scale equipment for Thin Film Evaporation (TFE), a Heat Exchanger (HE), and Continuous Filtration (CF). The second lab, Separations and Mass Transfer, includes Liquid-liquid Extraction (LLE), Gas Absorption (GA), Continuous Distillation (CD), and Batch Distillation (BD). An additional class, Safety and Experimental Evaluation, is taken as a co-requisite with the Energy Transfer and Fluids lab.