Online Data Resources in Chemical Engineering Education: Impact of the Uncertainty Concept

In traditional chemical engineering education practice, students have relied on either handbooks or online resources for a thermophysical property value that is relevant to an assigned problem. A property value consists of three parts, namely: the numerical value; its units of measurement; and, its uncertainty. Frequently, it’s this third part that is inadequately evaluated or even unknown. That can spell trouble, since uncertainty propagates through a problem’s solution to the result. We review the concept of uncertainty for thermophysical properties, its implementation in globally-adopted communication standards for properties data and the evolution of online data resources. To facilitate the translation of developments to engineering education, we employ NIST Web Thermo Tables to furnish properties data with their associated expanded uncertainties. We present pertinent examples for the engineering classroom [thermodynamics; fluid mechanics; heat and mass transfer] and an example application to research. These examples illustrate the practical combination of the concept of uncertainty with online data resources. Reference: S.H. Kim, J.W. Kang, K. Kroenlein, J.W. Magee, V. Diky, C.D. Muzny, A.F. Kazakov, R.D. Chirico and M. Frenkel, Chemical Engineering Education, 47(1),48-57(2013).