Virtual laboratories in (bio) chemical engineering education

In the last decades, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have been promoting the creation and adoption of new learning and teaching styles. Virtual laboratories, by overcoming some limitations of conventional hands-on experiments, have been adopted as a complement or in substitution of laboratory sessions. This paper describes the design and implementation of two virtual labs for biochemical engineering education intended for students at the BSc degree. One of the virtual labs is intended to fully replace the hands-on experiment and consists on the determination of the correlation between oxygen transfer rate, aeration rate and agitation power in a reactor. The other virtual lab consists on the determination of the residence time distribution (RTD) in continuous stirred tanks series and was implemented to support the physical experiments rather than replacing them. The virtual labs provide the students a learning platform covering the fundamentals underlying the experiment, its pre-visualization and simulation. The effectiveness of the implemented system was evaluated through direct experimentation and survey (through questionnaires) with students taking the chemical technology lab course. For the RTD virtual Lab, and based on specific learning outcomes, teachers could assess significant improvement in students' performance in the lab and also a more thorough discussion of the results in the reports. The survey results show that, in average, considering the two virtual labs and several classes, 93% of the students consider the virtual labs of great utility. (C) 2010 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.