(277b) Remote Lab Operations: Development of a Take-Home Lab Kit for the Exploration of Fluid Flow and Pump Characteristics

The shift in teaching modality due to COVID required flexibility and adaptability by instructors and students alike. While some courses easily transitioned, hands-on lab courses faced greater challenges. For many, the solution was to create recorded demonstration videos of lab experiments. While this response meets basic requirements for student exposure to concepts, it falls short in the development of psychomotor and sensory skills.

In a typical unit operations course, students are exposed to bench scale industrial processes such as heat exchange, pumping and fluid flow, reaction kinetics, distillation, and adsorption. Students learn how to operate equipment (e.g. pumps) and use instrumentation (e.g. thermocouples and rotameters). Development of psychomotor and sensory skills require physical interaction with objects and stimuli from the environment. To accomplish this in the remote modality, a take-home laboratory kit was proposed. The challenge was to balance cost, durability, safety, and relevance to engineering phenomena. After prototyping a few models, the team selected a kit that demonstrated fluid flow characteristics using a submersible pump.

The kit was comprised of common, readily available items such as: an aquarium pump, clear vinyl tubing, a gallon plastic jug, and a flexible tape measure. It also included a power meter and ground fault circuit interrupter. The kit was stored in a clear plastic bin which doubled as the water reservoir for the experiment. From this simple kit, students could observe fluid flow characteristics (physical representation of the Bernoulli equation) and calculate head losses and power requirements. Ultimately, the students would model pump curves from their data and predict pump performance under varying physical conditions.

As course modality shifts away from remote, sustainability of this innovation was considered. The kit can continue to be used as a regular or make-up lab assignment. Additionally, the kit can be pivoted for use in sophomore and junior level classes to reinforce the concepts (like Bernoulli’s equation) when they are first introduced to students. The difficulty level of the student activities can be adjusted to match their progression through the curriculum.

Here, we will present the details of acquiring parts, kit assembly, and sample student exercises and experiments.