My own personal model..! ;)

Chemical Engineering and its allied branches are mostly concerned with the design, development and operation of process equipments. Training to be a Chemical Engineer requires us to learn about a lot of process equipments viz heat exchangers, distillation columns, condensers , evaporators, absorption towers and many more and also about a various accessories and control systems used in the equipments and processes. Among all these, designing of process equipments is a really interesting subject. Depending upon the process that has to be carried out, and taking into account various physicochemical properties of the components involved and the operating as well as the environmental conditions, the process equipments are designed accordingly. Now the first step of designing involves identification of the process, the properties of the components involved and the material to be used. Then we have to make mathematical calculations accordingly in order to come up with the suitable dimensions for the process equipment. Once it is done, a drawing is prepared manually or by using computer based software and in the end the equipment is fabricated.

One can improve his skills and understanding of the process equipment design and fabrication by constructing small scale models out of cardboard or wood. There was one such competition organized in our college in which I happened to participate. It was an inter-collegiate competition with teams coming from different colleges and we had around 25 teams competing and the rules demanded each team to have a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 3 members. Each team was allowed to choose a paper with the information regarding the equipment model they were supposed to construct. We got 1-1 Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger which we started designing at once without wasting much time. Once you get involved into it, you won’t feel the time passing by and once the model is finished you realize that you had been working continuously for hours. And being the first time for us, we did face some issues and had to rework few calculations and get the dimensions right but in the end we managed to finish it. It was in no way a perfect model but it was close to perfect and after the review of the models the judgment was passed and the 1^st place went to a similar model from a different college..! I strongly felt that we deserved the 2^nd or the 3^rd place after looking at the other models which won the prize. But no worries, as long as we were satisfied by our performance and this being the first time we had participated in such an event, we can always improve , do better and hopefully win prizes in the future. But the bottom line is that I enjoyed every moment of it and that’s what matters.