An overview of portuguese chemical engineering undergraduate laboratories

The UNESCO’s World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century, Vision and Action (1998) states in its paragraph “Innovative educational approaches: critical thinking and creativity”: “[...] New pedagogical and didactical approaches should be accessible and promoted in order to facilitate the acquisition of skills, competencies and abilities for communication, creative and critical analysis, independent thinking and team work [...]”. The importance of teaching laboratories for students to acquire competencies and abilities especially in creative and critical analysis and teamwork is recognized. On the other hand it is generally recognized in all the EU countries that undergraduate labs are generally badly equipped, badly taught, badly organized and high budget consumers. To make things worse, the traditional education labs consume lots of reactants, produce lots of environmentally aggressive effluents, consume lots of students' time and have a modest output. Under this framework what should be changed? Would it be easy to do? Or are we condemned to live with bad labs and bad lab classes? Isolated efforts of laboratory professors and head of departments have been tried within each Portuguese University. Now it's time to involve all partners, head of departments, course directors, laboratory professors and students, of all schools, and make an effort to conquer a quantitative improvement of the undergraduate laboratories and dynamize an inter-school collaboration. The first step in this direction will be done, precisely, at this congress. Five experiences on main five Portuguese Universities (FEUP, IST, UA, UM, UC and UNL) are described, giving a picture of the effort being played in these institutions to improve the experimental education. Chemical Engineering Laboratories III at FEUP Adelio Mendes*; Fernao D. Magalhaes and Miguel Madeira The general objectives defined for Chemical Engineering Laboratories III, taught during the first semester of the fourth year of a five year Chemical Engineering course, are: i) to provide a practical perspective on the theoretical concepts taught in the reaction engineering and advanced separations processes courses, ii) to develop students’ conception, execution and operation capabilities and iii) to develop their written and oral communication skills, team work and work discipline competencies. This laboratory course started six years ago from scratch. It was a great opportunity to re-think its philosophy and to introduce new concepts. Firstly, the objectives were clearly stated. Then, after a careful bibliography review, a set of experimental setups was designed, assembled and tested. Four principles guided us during the selection/development of the experiments: 1) Intrinsic safety; 2) Low price and low operation cost; 3) Environmental safety and 4) High didactic content. In addition to the in-lab work, field trips are organized in close contact with the neighboring industry. Emphasis is placed on process units related to the scope of the course. A complete lab manual was written, including not only the description of each experimental work, but also introductory texts on the field trips, the student’s evaluation criteria, topics on data treatment, etc. Description In a typical semester, students have 12 sessions, 3 hours long. They work in groups of 2, arranged in classes of 5 to 6 groups. The first session is dedicated to introducing the course organization, security issues and operation of measurement instruments and other devices. A handbook is provided to each student at this time. The handbook contains the course organization, topics on statistical data treatment, description of the field trips, and, for each experimental work, it considers: i) Objectives; ii) Theoretical introduction; iii) Description of the experimental procedure; iv) Example of experimental results; v) Safety items; vi) Waste deposition; vii) Bibliography, among other items. Each group has to perform 7 experiments of a total of 14 experiments available: