Lehigh Design Course

This paper discusses a two-semester senior design course that combines traditional steady-state economic process design with dynamic plantwide control. This unique course has been taught at Lehigh for more than a decade and has garnered rave reviews from students, industry, and ABET. Each student design group has its own industrial consultant who provides a design project for that group and serves as a mentor/expert for the students. Design projects are begun immediately at the beginning of the fall semester. Lectures are given on overall design principles, design trade-offs, reactor design, distillation column design, simple heuristic optimization methods, and engineering economics. In a computer-aided laboratory the students learn how to use a steady-state simulator. By the end of the first semester, each group has developed an economically optimum flowsheet. During the spring semester the students learn how to use a dynamic simulator, and lectures are given on control of individual units, plantwide control principles, and the interaction/conflict between design and control. The groups develop rigorous dynamic simulations of their multi-unit processes and evaluate alternative plantwide control structures for product quality performance and operability. A major advantage of incorporating dynamic simulation in the design course is that is permits quantitative dynamic studies of process safety issues. Quantitative studies of dynamic reactor runaways and vessel over-pressuring can be made with the dynamic simulations of the process equipment.