(348i) Teaching Hands-on Process Control Courses with Arduino Based Tclab, Matlab and Simulink

Several companies that hire chemical engineering graduates expect practical knowledge of theoretical concepts. Laboratory courses are an important component of chemical engineering education as they help students solidify engineering concepts and offer students a chance to translate theory into practice. With increased enrollments and COVID-19, it became a challenge to scale up these lab courses to offer every student a high-quality, hands-on experience in classroom and online teaching settings. TCLab is a open-source, community-developed, Arduino-based, inexpensive temperature control device that addresses these challenges as a take-home lab. TCLab is interfaced with MATLAB and Simulink which are widely used in academia and industry. Along with mastering advanced control concepts through hands-on experience with TCLab, students gain programming skills on topics such as process control, data science, and numeric computation.

This talk highlights a chemical engineering curriculum with TCLab, MATLAB and Simulink, and various teaching tools and resources such as executable notebooks, interactive apps, and free self-paced online tutorials. Feedback from the student learning experience is related from 2015-present with 7000 units distributed to universities and industrial practitioners.