Making a chemical process control course an inductive and deductive learning experience

A chemical process control course was restructured to include significant elements of experiential learning. The course described is a three-hour lecture course offered in the senior year. When preparing to modify the course to add experiments and increase inductive content, the topics that were selected for emphasis included instrumentation, relationship of first- and second-order model parameters to responses of real systems, empirical modeling, signal conditioning and interpretation, PID controllers and tuning, and MIMO interaction. Students expressed a distinct preference for the faster experiments, since much of the time spent on the slower (thermal) labs was spent idly waiting for the system to reach steady state. Students were concerned about the time spent on the thermal labs, and preferred having a regularly scheduled lab section. No direct assessment of any improvement in student learning was possible.