Chemical Engineering Teaching in COVID-19 Times: Successfully Adapting a Capstone Design Course to a Remote Format.

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic required educational institutions to adapt face-to-face to remote teaching. This study reports the experience in the first semester of 2020 for a Chemical Engineering Capstone Design Course at the University of Campinas in Brazil. In this course, senior year students develop a group project, in which they simulate a chemical plant and evaluate its technoeconomic feasibility. In 2020, the groups were proposed to design a process to replace diesel fuel from the bus fleet in Campinas city with renewable fuel DME. Because of the pandemic, several adaptations were needed: the theoretical classes became asynchronous, group meetings were online, a commercial simulator was replaced by an open access one, and the schedule was extended by 2 weeks. Despite that, the students had a great performance, comparable to face-to-face. To assess student satisfaction, a questionnaire was used. The course met the expectations of most of the students who also recommended keeping it in the remote format or merging it with face-to-face teaching. Therefore, these changes made it possible to apply new teaching dynamics and tools that could be used in the future to improve the course quality.

Process design and economics of a flexible ethanol-butanol plant annexed to a eucalyptus kraft pulp mill.

This work proposes a strategy, from a process design standpoint, for pulp companies to enter the Brazilian ethanol market. The flexible plant converts eucalyptus-derived glucose to either ethanol or butanol (according to market conditions) and xylose only to butanol production. Depending on the biomass pretreatment technology, Monte Carlo simulations showed that the Net Present Value (NPV) of the flexible plant increases by 20-28% in relation to an ethanol-dedicated plant. Whereas the lower costs of the steam explosion technology turns the investment more attractive (NPV = 184 MMUSD; IRR = 29%), the organosolv technology provides better flexibility to the plant. This work also shows that excessive power consumption is a hurdle in the development of flash fermentation technology chosen for the flexible plant. These results indicate that conventional batch fermentation is preferable if the enzymatic hydrolysis step operates with solids loading up to 20 wt%.