2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In chemical engineering education, connecting theoretical knowledge and practical application is crucial to helping students bridge the gap between engineering principles and how they are used, and preparing them to enter the workforce. Important in this process are the laboratory classes in the undergraduate curriculum. However, barriers of cost, equipment, and space availability exist, making implementation of lab experiences in a wide variety of typical industrial equipment challenging for undergraduate programs. This is especially true of the topic of process dynamics and control, typically taken by students in their final year. This course is a key class in the curriculum where students integrate the knowledge they have accumulated over their education with new topics of dynamic process operation and feedback control. Because these topics are generally challenging to students and significant to industry, laboratory experience is especially important. Unfortunately, the cost of industrial control systems, on top of the cost of laboratory-scale unit operations equipment, may be prohibitive for programs. In addition, instructors may not have the experience or time to set up these systems. In this paper, we present a bench-top liquid-level process identification and control project, designed to help transition theoretical understanding to hands-on application, giving students a chance to develop real-world problem-solving skills in engineering.

Using a low-cost Seeed Studio XIAO microcontroller, students interact with sensors, pumps, and pulse width modulation (PWM), reinforcing their understanding of feedback loops with process dynamics. There are several benefits to this type of experiment. For the student, the project provides the opportunity to learn about process instrumentation, utilize more complex control algorithms, and investigate process nonlinearities. Students also gain valuable experience with microcontrollers, PWM control, troubleshooting, and programming digital control algorithms. For the department, benefits include the low cost of the components and scalability to many other inexpensive and easily available sensors and actuators. In addition, the XIAO is natively programmed in CircuitPython, a microcontroller language based on Python, which many departments already utilize for scientific computing. Using a microcontroller programmed in language with which students are already familiar allows instructors to spend limited instructional time more efficiently, avoiding having to teach another programming language.