INTEGRATED PROJECT OF AGRICULTURAL WASTE PROCESSING FOR PACKAGING PAPER MANUFACTURING

Within the Chemical Engineering degree framework, the students use to have huge amount of subjects that, very often, have little intersection between them, which may provide a global vision of an applied Chemical Engineering Project. The present work, developed by undergraduate and PhD students from chemical engineering, is intended to offer an integral vision of the operations and concepts involved in the transformation of an agricultural residue to a final added value product, like paper for packaging. The integrated project, run in a half-industrial way, comprises the typical stages of any industrial process of similar characteristics: i) provisioning of residues, ii) raw material preparation, iii) fibre manufacturing, iv) packaging paper manufacturing and v) commercial and technical product properties assessment. From a point of view of human resources, some responsibilities regarding to each process step are established. In each area, the responsible depends directly to the manufacturing manager. The integrated project, over supervision, is executed sequentially to allow the students to know all the equipments involved in the process and thus they may be able to develop initiatives that drive to the product and process improvement. During the development of the project, the manufacturing manager organizes daily meetings with each responsible where the knowledge and aptitudes acquired by the students are discussed, what allows their continuous evaluation. From a pedagogical point of view, the students involved in the project will acquire knowledge near to the industrial practices and strongly related with the subjects from their curriculum. Therefore, regarding the industrial steps of the project, in the first stage, the student will gain knowledge related to logistics, transport, chemical analysis, milling and classification. In the second stage, some practical aspects about reactors, reaction kinetics, process yield, residues production and their treatment, filtering, drying and other physical parameters typical from the paper suspensions will be studied. The third stage consists on paper sheets manufacturing and improving of the mechanical properties through beating processes. Here, the students will be developing concepts about enzymatic and mechanical beating, addition of improved cellulose fibers (like cellulose nanofibers) and other techniques aiming to enhance the properties of paper. They will learn how important is to be able to control the properties and, also, to make decision of about the best treatment depending on the established requirements. Finally, regarding to the fourth and last stage, the students have to be able to assess the product and manufacturing costs, to compare their product with the existing ones, to assess the market and, finally, to optimize their process with techniques like lean management and open innovation. As a conclusion, this work involves manufacturing management techniques, green innovation and manufacturing, sustainable production process, green chemistry, physical operations, industrial chemistry and the most topics included in the Chemical Engineering Degree curriculum.