The Teaching of Process Control at Undergraduate Level
Process control has emerged as a major technical speciality for chemical engineers. As a result, more and more chemical engineers are developing careers in this field. However, the way of teaching process control at undergraduate level sometimes doesn't meet the learning expectations and the students graduate with many unclear concepts that prevent them the efficient application of process control in their professional careers. There are answers to this situation: Process control textbooks that don't match the mathematical skills of our students, subject content that has been developed in isolation with the rest of the chemical engineering subjects, etc. The porpoise of this paper is to present some teaching alternatives that have been implemented with the aim of facilitating the correct learning of process control. The first part of the project was to develop a learning package that contained the planning and time management (mapping) of the subject, assessment components, topics, and feedback to self assessment questions. Each topic presents learning outcomes, detailed treatment of a specific process control topic, and some activities such as lecture slides on the Web, worked examples and self assessment questions that can be checked at the end of the learning package. Each lecture is complemented with class and computer tutorials and laboratory work. The development of the learning package took around eight years and reflects the current needs and skills of our students as well as the needs of industry.