New Tech Will Let Undergraduates Dive Deeper

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE)’s hands-on undergraduate curriculum just got some major upgrades.

With an allotment from the Tickle College of Engineering Educational Lab Upgrade Fund, CBE has purchased an ultrafiltration unit and a fermenter. The new equipment has been installed in the Eastman Unit Operations Laboratory (Eastman Laboratory), a teaching and research laboratory in the basement of the Dougherty Engineering Building.

“There are two junior and senior-level undergraduate laboratories conducted there, one in spring and one in fall,” said Eastman Professor of Practice Sankar Raghavan. “We’re trying to make this a lab that supplements, and makes it easier for people to relate to, the theory they learn in class.”

Giving Undergrads Space to Experiment

The first undergraduate course taught in the Eastman Laboratory is a relatively simple extension of the classroom curriculum, where students apply their knowledge about heat, mass, and momentum transfer. The second course is more open-ended, allowing students to explore the scientific process and the various pieces of equipment available in the lab.

In the second course, students are given nine possible experimental goals, such as attempting to create, concentrate, and purify a particular biological product or to safely scale up an exothermic reaction. Each student is assigned three such goals and spends four weeks on each project.

The first half of each experiment is devoted to familiarizing themselves with the equipment, learning the basic operating and safety procedures, and collecting preliminary data. In the latter half, students are given free reign to try optimizing the biomolecular and chemical engineering protocols to achieve their goal.

“We try to promote independent thinking among our students,” Raghavan said. “I say to the students up front, ‘I give you the basic procedure, but you may deviate from it as you prefer based on what you observe.’”

This freedom takes students beyond application of their classroom curriculum, giving them the chance to think critically about the rationale behind each step in a protocol or the choice between different pieces of equipment.

“Our Eastman Laboratory gives students a chance to have hands-on experience with smaller-scale versions of equipment that they may work with in their future careers,” said CBE Instructor of Practice Brandon Stevens. “Throughout the curriculum, our students learn the theory and math behind some of the unit operations, but the lab allows the students to connect that theory with practical application, observe differences, and understand factors that explain these differences.”

Fermentation and Ultrafiltration will Enhance Student Experience

The Eastman Laboratory’s new filtration unit and fermenter are part of a broader push to deepen CBE students’ understanding of both types of engineering the department offers.

“Even though the department is chemical and biomolecular engineering, we are working to give students the freedom to specialize in one or the other,” Raghavan said. “To that end, we want to add in biomolecular engineering experiments.”

Raghavan hopes that the ultrafiltration unit will be the first of many purification technologies available to CBE students.

“A great deal of the cost and effort that goes into biomolecular processes is not from the production of the molecule itself, but purifying the molecule from that mix that comes out of fermentation,” he said. “So we are trying to slowly add items that will cover the different kinds of purification operations, like chromatographic purification, crystallization, and so on. Ultrafiltration was the first step.”

Meanwhile, the fermenter will not only give students experience with one of the foundational tools of biomolecular engineering, but also let them contribute to the education of future Vols.

“The fermentation process takes a while, so it’s not possible for students to conduct multiple trials within the limited time of a laboratory class,” Raghavan said. “With this new unit, all the data each student generates is saved in the cloud, so future groups can look at those real data, see what went wrong, and see how they can anticipate problems and account for them while planning their own experiments. I think that is going to be a big deal.”

These new units in Eastman Laboratory will elevate CBE students’ experiences far beyond what is possible in typical undergraduate chemical and biomolecular teaching labs, which are usually limited to standard unit operations such as heat exchangers and distillation columns.

Using the highly specialized equipment will also give students more opportunities to explore their career interests beyond what is possible to cover in lecture courses.

“As there is already a lot of content in the classes, specialized techniques such as separation via ultrafiltration are not often discussed in great detail,” Stevens said. “Our fermenter and ultrafiltration units will allow students to gain practical experience in aspects of CBE that are not often covered in detail through the curriculum, which is especially important for those who may be pursuing careers in these fields.”

Contact

Izzie Gall (865-974-7203, egall4@utk.edu)