The Contraband

Issue date: 11/16/09 Section: News

Media Credit: DAN CUTRER / THE CONTRABAND

Media Credit: Dan Cutrer / The Contraband Undergraduate students now have a place to get hands-on experience in the new model chemical plant.

On Monday, November 2nd the McNeese College of Engineering and Engineering Technology unveiled a new addition to their facilities: A model training chemical plant. This new facility, situated in a space immediately behind Kirkman hall, contains scale models of real industrial chemical plant processes and apparatuses designed to allow undergraduate students with prospects of working in the plants to have hands-on experience with actual industrial equipment.

The miniature plant, designed and built by Polaris Engineering, features the Hands On Trainer, a climbing tower, an enclosed space training tower, and a glycol-water distillation unit which is expected to be installed very shortly that will also operate alongside the HOT unit. All these facilities can be expanded and upgraded, and there is still plenty of space to house additional training components.

The enclosed space training tower is a fiberglass cylinder thirty feet tall and five feet wide which, when fully completed, will contain several distillation trays, each two feet apart. This feature is designed to acclimate students to working in very small spaces with little or no lighting. Just as with actual plant towers, students are going to work inside the dark, two-foot space to simulate procedures in environments that are common among chemical plants. Dr. Nikos Kiritsis, Dean of the College of Engineering, notes that such experience is invaluable for undergraduate students who do not expect to work on the field in these intimidating environments.

The climbing tower functions in a similar fashion to the enclosed space training tower. Situated next to the enclosed space tower, the climbing tower is an industrial metal construct with a ladder that extends upwards for thirty feet alongside the metal frame to access the upper components of the enclosed space tower. This feature was built to familiarize students with the prospect of climbing the tower ladders of actual chemical plants that can reach fifty feet and higher, as well as teaching students proper uses of personal protective equipment (p.p.e.) when climbing towers as high as or even higher than the training tower. Students who aren't familiar with climbing to lengthy heights can experience a lot of anxiety when asked by an employer to do so in the field, as Dr. Kiritsis points out.

The HOT unit gives students the opportunity to operate a miniature plant facility as it would operate in the workplace. The outdoor facility is mounted on a twelve foot by twenty five foot skid and features a network of scaled piping and valve systems that are operated by computer in a nearby control room in the engineering laboratory building.

The water-glycol distillation unit, which will also be built on a skid and will be joined to the HOT unit once completed, will be a scaled, functioning distillation column twenty five feet high and one foot in diameter. While the miniature plant will not be distilling any volatile chemicals, the plant will separate a 50/50 mixture of water and glycol to approximately 99% purity.

Though the model plant is using scaled versions of their industrial counterparts, such as two inch pipes as opposed to five inch pipes, the facility is still genuinely industrial. Dr. Kiritsis mentions that just like a real plant, while the pipes and valves may look shiny and clean now, none of the new training facilities will be immune from accumulating rust and wear, and instruction on maintenance is also going to be a part of the training facility.

The facility installed so far has cost around $300,000 with funding provided in part by various donations from the H.C. Drew Estate, Basell, who donated a Honeywell TDC 3000 Distributed Control System, and Trunkline LNG, who donated the furniture and simulation software for the control room. The McNeese Technological Advancement for Students Committee (TASC) provided $221,000 toward the model plant facilities themselves, covering most of the costs.

Dr. Kiritsis notes that it is very rare for a four-year university to have an industrial training facility like the model chemical plant. Most colleges have chemical engineering plants of their own in which graduate students may conduct research, but undergraduate students are left to face real plant environments and procedures with little hands-on training. Indeed, McNeese is the only college in the University of Louisiana system that currently has a model plant for undergraduates.

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