(213a) Developing Chemical Engineering Acumen By Brewing Kicking Mule Beer

Jesse Hudgins, Geoffrey Bull, Matthew Armstrong, Joshua White

1) Department of Chemistry and Life Science, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 10996

Developing Chemical Engineering Acumen by Brewing Kicking Mule Beer

 The Kicking Mule Brewing Co. enables members of our chemical engineering club, students and beer enthusiasts alike, to combine chemical engineering acumen, knowledge, and skills by developing a tangible product. Currently, Kicking Mule Brewing Co. aspires to hone in on the scientific aspects of brewing. The West Point Chemical Engineering program is process oriented and the Kicking Mule Brewery allows Cadets hands-on experience with a batch reaction process. Through a rigorous on-site brewing process, with subject matter experts, our end goal is enhancement of student chemical engineering knowledge with respect to batch reactors and mixtures, heat exchange processes, chemical engineering process control, and bio-chemical reaction rates while simultaneously providing quality products to The United States Corps of Cadets.

We will demonstrate how chemical engineering aspects of the brewing process are incorporated to facilitate development of acumen in process controls, chemical reaction engineering, heat and mass transfer, and the economic aspects involved. We will collect reactant and product vs. time data for several batches of Kicking Mule beer and fit known published models to the data. [1,2] We will fit the model parameters to the data using a recently published parallel tempering algorithm. [5] We will then calculate the overall heat transfer coefficients for all of our heating and cooling equipment using best practices outlined in literature. Following this effort, we will record transient temperature control information on our PID temperature controlling devices and compare our calculations to the published equipment specifications. [3,4]

Finally, with our modeling and parametric analysis complete, we will use the CHEMCAD software to model the entire process, including the kinetic fermentation reactor data, the overall heat transfer coefficient for all heat exchangers, and the control parameters, and time constants of our automatic process control devices with a view to staying as true to the beer brewing system data as possible. [1-4]

References

[1] de Andres-Toro et al. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 48 (1998).

[2] Fogler, S.H. Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering 4^th ed. (2006).

[3] Russell, T.W., A.S. Robinson, N. J. Wagner. Mass and Heat Transfer. (2008).

[4] Smith C.A., and A. Corripio. Principles and Practice of Automatic Process Controls 3^rd ed. (2006).

[5] Armstrong et al. AIChE Journal (2016).