ChE 499/599 Design Project

ADVICE FROM PREVIOUS YEARS BENTLEY 2011

Characteristics of highly and poorly performing groups
Here are a few things the academic advisors have noted over the years Highly-performing groups Start work in week 1, and maintain a consistent effort through the semester Maintain transparency if one person is struggling, he/she lets other group members know so they can help fix problems before they become critical Work as a cohesive group of 4 or 5 people All group members attend the academic meetings, unless there are exceptional reasons, and then they provide an apology Bring evidence of their progress to the industry and academic meetings (reference materials, hand calculations, printouts, sketches, ...) Take notes at industry meetings and make sure that all the information gets back to each group member, e.g. through meeting minutes Are on time for meetings and assessments Make a start, show evidence of their work to the advisors and then ask for feedback Maintain contact with the industry advisor throughout the semester When faced with uncertainty, they do a reasonable amount of research, set out the alternatives, and then proceed with the best option as far as can be judged given their current state of knowledge Accept shared ownership of the project each person may lead the work in one section, but other group members review and revise the work, and can speak about it with authority Work on their major and minor individual designs at the same time Maintain good control over their documents / spreadsheets / simulation files / they are stored in multiple or secure locations, and people know which is the latest version Plan their work, e.g. using a Gantt chart, regularly review their % completion of each task, and maintain a balance with other units Poorly-performing groups Are slow to start and then rush near the end Do not talk to each other as problems develop members promise work, but dont deliver on it; other group members find out when it is too late to fix the problem satisfactorily Splinter into subgroups: 4+1, 3+2, 2+1+1, Group members tend not to show up to meetings, often without providing a satisfactory reason or meeting apology Talk about what theyve done, without showing any evidence of it Take notes at industry meetings, but forget to share the outcomes with other group members Are late Just ask general questions Communicate with the industry advisor at the start, but that drops off around week 6 Delay making any decisions, spend an excessive amount of time researching the topic or trying to find the exact data, and run out of time near the end Divide up the total work, allocate sections to each person, then just collate the results with no or little crosschecking; Youll have to ask XXX about that section I dont know about it Tend to want to finish their major before starting their minor Lose track of the latest files, dont use secure storage or have backups, and suffer substantial losses of work when their PC / laptop / USB drive inevitably crashes or gets a virus Lose track of time, concentrate only on the Design Project and forget about other units

Some advice from a past student

I asked the class: If you could give some advice to students next year for how to work on the project, what would you tell them? Here is the response from one (highly successful) former student. I agree with most, but not necessarily all the comments (see my footnotes), but I will give the reply verbatim: Understand that selecting a minerals project requires the use of spreadsheets to develop your own material and energy balances1. HYSYS and ASPEN PLUS are better suited to fluid systems. HYSYS requires less input than ASPEN PLUS when you aren't exactly sure what you are doing. ASPEN requires significantly more inputs which you generally don't know the values of when you are running your simulation. HYSYS allows for a more trial and error based approach if you really have no idea of what a pressure or temperature should be. Don't design a smelter or a reformer2, they are not undergraduate level items that you can design in 3 weeks as well as you would a column, heat exchanger, more simple reactor etc. Do work in the first 2 weeks. Don't wait until week 3 to begin your plant layout and process selection because it is too late by then and you will get stuck designing an infeasible bit of equipment. Make a good simulation the first time around. Get 2/3 people to work on it for a week whilst the other two complete other components of the memo. The simulation is great for validating the use of certain equipment whilst creating flowsheet change. Have good document control. Upload documents to the Microsoft SkyDrive or similar so that all members of the group can access the most recent version of a document. It is no good if you update something a week old without knowing it. Have a balanced life, enjoy your weekends, play some sports and visit your partner. You do your best thinking when you haven't been sitting at a computer looking at the same item for hours pondering the same issue. Pick a group of people who will work as hard as you do. If 3 people work hard and 2 don't, then time will become an issue. Leave at least 3 days to format the report and another 5 hours to print and bind it. The formatting probably still won't be done by that time, but it can't be done in 1 day. Write large sections of volume 1 as you do the work in the first 6 weeks. Don't leave it to the end. Process selection, market survey, economics etc. are not what you will be thinking about come the final 2 weeks of semester. Converging a column or finding minerals related data will be more important by then.

This is not exactly true some groups, with support from their industry advisor, used the minerals processing simulator SysCAD to do the mass and energy balances. 2 With appropriate guidance from academic and industry advisors, units like these can be suitable for individual design work. The depth of the design work is not as much as expected from more standard units like distillation columns or heat exchangers.

Check the duties and physical size of your equipment. Seriously, does a 200,000MW smelter sound reasonable? No! Australia doesn't use that much power. Is a distillation column 10m in diameter, 11m in height a good design? No! You have just designed a tank... Petrochemical and gas projects should refer to the hydrocarbon processing handbooks published (Petrochemical is 2010, Gas Processing is 2009) to get a list of the types of technologies that real companies have used. For example, the Petrochemical Process Handbook contains about 6 different methods to produce methanol. Not everything is provided, just the basic flow scheme and production capacity, but it is a good start to determine how to make the chemical and you can chop/add equipment items according to the specific feed given for that project. Be nice to your supervisors, both academic and industrial. Some of those who completed the projects this year were offered graduate jobs through interviews conducted based on the industrial supervisor's recommendation, i.e. the design project might get you a job, so put your best foot forward and demonstrate that you achieved something after 18 years of education.