Chemical plant design project: A concurrent assessment of individual and team skills

Vishnu Pareek, Tejas Bhatella, Nicoleta Balliu, Ming Ang, Moses Tadé and Hari Vuthaluru
Curtin University of Technology

Keywords: team assessment; individual assessment

In the Chemical Engineering curriculum, Chemical Plant Design is the most significant unit that students complete prior to graduation. The aim of this unit is to train the undergraduate students in applying the assimilative knowledge gained in the previous units. It is a requirement of the Institution of Chemical Engineers that both individual and team skills be assessed. In order to achieve this objective, the design task is separated into two different segments with six weeks of group work followed by another six weeks of individual work.

During the first six weeks, groups are assigned weekly targets, including one formal presentation from each group and guided on how to achieve them through lectures and invited talks. In the last six weeks, each member works as an individual to perform detailed design of specified equipment. In the first half, the group exercise is packed with almost each and every aspect required by a process engineer to carry out a preliminary design, ranging from development of process to economic assessment, block diagrams to detailed PID, feasibility study to process control including sustainability. The other half of the exercise requires each individual to carry out an active, diligent and systematic process design in order to discover, interpret and revise facts, events, and theories, to perform practical applications. Individuals, in consultation with the academic as well as industrial supervisors, are expected to set their own targets and perform their own research.

At the end of the semester, the students are required to submit a final report as a set of three volumes with detailed design and analysis. Volume 1 comprises a maximum 50 pages summarising the findings of the team tasks performed during the first half of the semester (including the revisions made as a result of detailed design calculations in the second half of the semester); Volume 2 of the report contains individual contributions as the detailed design of selected pieces of equipment from the overall plant flowsheet; and Volume 3 is a compilation of all additional information including Appendices and Hand Calculations. In summary, a novel scheme has been devised to assess the individual and team skills, both for the work performed during in-semester and in the end-of-semester submissions.