WEEK 3
Calculations? Finalized. Poster? Printed. Are we ready? Guess not.Well, that’s what we felt the day before presenting. We were not sure about the calculation nor the steps we have considered. As Dr Tazli said, “You cannot solve this problem. We will judge based on the steps you have considered not the accuracy of the design”, we were not sure whether we have considered all the important steps. On the day of presentation, I was very tired since I have been literally burning the midnight oil (Thank God, we have bulb) for past three days. We were told that we will be judged by three lecturers. We were slightly at fear but confident since we have worked hard for this. Dr Ekmi and Miss Aina (hope I am not mistaken) came first, and we presented to them. Dr Ekmi asked us about the material balance and we answered based on the knowledge we gained from Reaction Engineering lectures and also the articles we read. Hopefully they were convinced and gave us good marks. After them, Dr Tazli came and we presented to him. Due to time restriction, he skip the part of our presentation and started explaining the steps we should consider in this task. We were glad that we actually took most of the steps into considerations. From his explanation, we really did learn more too. And that was the end to PBL.
80% must be done by Monday class. And luckily we managed to do it whether it was correct or not. For Monday class, Dr Raihan went from one group to another group to check their PBL work. When it was our turn, she gave advice on how to find the rate law and etc and it really helped me alot. I also eavesdropped other group explanation to get more ideas. Two nights before the d-day, we stayed up till late night to solve everything including the poster and we did it. During PBL presentation, we did our best to answer questions from evaluators and I hope they were satisfied with our answers. I felt that finally it will come to an end and we need to push ourselves to our limit to come up with good ideas. All the members supported each other by staying together till the last minute. All that is left now is the marks and I hope our team get good marks based on our effort. Through this PBL, I have view on what I need to do during my final year but the difference is this is a group work and in future, I will be alone to do it. I also learn on how a reactor is designed in industry and I hope it will be a help for me in future. And I will keep continue the up and down journey together with others.
On the last, we started to push the pedal hard. We started to figure out that the reaction was non-elementary. Thanks to Silva’s articles, we found how to calculate the coefficient constant for each desired and undesired reaction during the process took place, we got to calculate the reaction rate of the desired and undesired process. However, our mistake here was that we didn’t calculate the reaction order of this process. Regarding on designing the membrane, it was fine but then Dr Tazli proposed that we should make a small hole along the membrane reactor to insert the methane slowly so that process would favor the desired reaction based on our calculation. It was fun experience for me even though at first stage it was really hard. Now i got a glimpse of what chemical engineers will do in the future.
In this last week, the presentation was around the corner. Fortunately, our group basically have 80% done in our pbl project. The discussions about the poster and the making of reactor model have been made. In the presentation session, we did our best. Im very satisfied with my team, this pbl things teach us about how become a WISE engineer. Im looking forward for next PBL project.