Week 7: The Beginning of the End

Lecture

In lecture this week, we learned more about analyzing experimental data, and presenting to both technical and non-technical audiences. We also talked a little bit about technical writing and how it should be created and formatted. The main aspect of the class that we talked about this week was our Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs). PFDs are a great way to show the process that we’ve come up with but the ones that we made in the beginning of the term were oversimplified and lacked detail. They also used educated guesses at most in order to get the numbers for the amounts of substances going in and coming out. Finally, we also talked a little bit about what chemical engineers do and the fields that they work in, which was very interesting for us cause that’s what we all are!

Lab

In this week’s lab, we had two choices for what to do. We could either continue experimenting and gathering data, or we could focus more on literature study and our PFDs. We chose the latter because we felt like we had done enough experimentation and it was time to work more on how our industrial process with turmeric would work. On the side, we also had to work on the technical draft for our final report.

Anyway, for the work in our Process Flow Diagrams, the group focused on the machinery that would be involved, the prices for said machinery, and the steps that we would have to take to truly get curcumin out of turmeric. This process started with us editing our final process flow diagram and including existing factory machines that could help us with the extraction. Here is our final Process Flow Diagram:

In short, the turmeric gets peeled and washed, gets pounded, gets extracted using ethanol, and then gets the ethanol evaporated to separate the curcumin.

Here are more detailed steps for each part of the PFD.

Now that we had the machines and steps finalized, it was time to figure out how much curcumin we could get out of the turmeric. We did this by cumulating all of our optimal data for each parameter from the experimental phase, averaging the masses and getting the average mass percent of coffee extracted. We then used this percent value to find out how much curcumin we could get out of the turmeric, and we saw that it was 5.6 grams of curcumin from 20 grams of turmeric. While this is extremely idealistic, it gives us a start on how efficient our process could be.

And that sums up what we did during week 7 for our engineering class. Stay tuned for week 8 where we do more research, but this time on the economic side of the field!