INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY BY THE UNIT PLANT METHOD*
In the recent report of the Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, appointed to study engineering education in the United States, the need for chemical training for foremanship in the growing chemical industries was emphasized. Pratt Institute has for a score of years been devoting its energies to giving engineering education of the non-collegiate type. The Department of Industrial Chemical Engineering does not produce designing chemical engineers, factory managers or research chemists; but does produce graduates who become industrial chemists, engineering inspectors, department foremen, technical assistants, chemical salesmen, and to a limited extent, analysts, assayers, and assistant chemists. The graduates of the two-year intensive course become the trained plant operatives of industrial organizations. Most of our students have had a number of years of industrial experience before entering their training; this industrial experience in a sense is a prerequisite for entrance. They are all of a decidedly practical bent. Their courses of training must be adapted to them. This paper concerns itself particularly with one of the component parts of the two-year course in industrial chemical engineering. The division is that of industrial chemistry. The average college is poorly or not at all equipped in this particular field. The same is true to a lesser extent in our engineering schools of the country. Only in the outstanding schools do we find good and semi-commercial size equipment for teaching industrial chemistry. There are two general methods of instruction-one the unit process and the other the unit plant. In the first the unit chemical engineering processes-evaporation, filtration, distillation, etc., are given attention; in the other the unit plant and its products are specifically studied. The second method is adapted to our work at Pratt Institute. The equipment of the laboratory is in the form of unit plants set up as such with large amounts of individual equipment capable of assembly into semi-commercial plants. For example, the soap unit, capable of producing any kind of commercial soap, consists of a lye tank, boiling tank, crutcher, wire cutter, slabber, soap mill, drier, plodder and cake stamping machine. A batch is 500 cakes of soap produced in a commercially finished shape, wrapped and ready for delivery. The paint plant, consisting of paste mixers, burr stone mills, pebble mills and thinning mixers produces ten gallons of finished paint as a minimum hatch. * A paper read before the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemf cal Sodety, Richmond, Va., April 13, 1927.
The tannery is exceedingly well equipped. As one student remarked,
it is almost possible to walk in a cow on the hoof and walk out with the finished leather on your own hoof. The tannery is almost an industrial unit. The same holds true for the electroplating plant, the fine chemicals station and dyeing plant and the dye testing unit, the ink and pigment plant and the distillation, drying, and hydraulic equipment. Other machines such as furnaces, filters and filter presses, pumps, vacuum machinery, grinding equipment, for special uses, are ef semi-commercial size. The instruction in the course of industrial chemistry is given from the unit plant viewpoint. The men operate the various plants in groups under one of their number acting as foreman, makiig the commercial substances on their own responsibility (of course, under instructor's supervision), produce standard quality products and dispose of the same to commercial consumers. In this manner they operate practical machinery, work on a commercial scale and learn chemical engineering unit processes indirectly, but acquiring commercial acquaintance with the manufacture of chemical products. The Chemical Industries Laboratories at Pratt Institute in operation have been a show place for visitors for many years. Its success as a teaching unit, as part of the work in industrial chemical engineering courses, is attested by the commercial success of its now 700 graduates. The arrangement of the laboratories, the layout of the equipment, the selection and operation of the equipment have proved a successful way of training men for foremanship in the chemical and allied industries.
