2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Generative AI (Gen. AI) models have found a wide variety of applications. Within chemical engineering a few of these applications include generating Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams [1] and building mathematical models for core course problems [2].
This study investigates engineering students’ perception and integration of Gen. AI into a series of process design assignments. It focuses on a second-year chemical engineering course introducing physical chemistry, material and energy balances and basic chemical engineering design.
Students were surveyed on their use of Gen. AI at the end of the course. Responses were received from 32 of 122 students (26%). 18 students reported using Gen. AI and 14 reported not using Gen. AI. Students from both groups noted concerns around Gen. AI response quality and academic integrity. Students who used AI generally appeared to use it for particular targeted tasks including idea generation, research, document editing, presentation creation and coding. Future tasks of this work will focus on investigating effective and critical methods of integrating Gen AI into course activities.
References
[1] E. Hirtreiter, L. Schulze Balhorn, and A. M. Schweidtmann, “Toward automatic generation of control structures for process flow diagrams with large language models,” AIChE Journal, vol. 70, no. 1, p. e18259, 2024, doi: 10.1002/aic.18259.
[2] M.-L. Tsai, C. W. Ong, and C.-L. Chen, “Exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) in chemical engineering education: Building core course problem models with Chat-GPT,” Education for Chemical Engineers, vol. 44, pp. 71–95, Jul. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.ece.2023.05.001.