It is well known that hands-on experience is a critical component of effective education for most undergraduate students. However, in many large state universities the majority of the education is in a classroom format, where an engineering laboratory experience is typically limited to one or two semesters towards the end of the student's academic career. The reasons for limited undergraduate laboratory experience, especially in universities that have significant research activities, is the considerable expense in both instructor time and space necessary for the operation of teaching laboratories. In order to address this situation we have developed a new Fundamentals Laboratory to provide undergraduate chemical engineering students hands-on experience during the sophomore and junior years in a manner that is both cost effective to operate and requires only a modest amount of laboratory space. A series of 12 modular experiments have been developed for three ChE core courses: fluid mechanics, heat & mass transfer and kinetic & reaction engineering, where at Purdue we have 8 replicates of each experiment. Each experiment is self contained and can be completed in a pair of two hour lab session scheduled in a single week. At the end of the week a technician disconnects the 8 experiments and then connects a new set of 8 experiments for the following week's class; thus, over a 12 week period each of the three core undergraduate courses have 4 different experiments – all in the same laboratory with only one technician and with no additional faculty instructors. With the 8 replicate experiments we can provide a hands-on experience in these three courses to over 120 students per year per class. The experiments reinforce basic principles (e.g. heat conduction, Dittus-Boelter correlation, pressure drop vs. flow rate in a pipe, pump characteristic, plug flow reactor, etc.) just as the students are being taught that concept in the lecture course. We will report on how the addition of hands-on experiments improves the educational effectiveness in teaching the core chemical engineering principles.

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