Utilização da ferramenta excel como auxílio pedagógico no projeto de colunas de destilação

Abstract

In Chemical Engineering, the use of new teaching methods to achieve greater participation of students and to improve their learning needs the support of some kind of technology due to the hard manual working to project an equipment. Although there are several software that meets the needs of the students, those tools should be practical, both in the classroom and in their study at home. When the topic discussed is distillation, during unit operations classes in Chemical Engineering, the methods used in column design are often hard to solve manually. For such projects, graphical methodologies are used, such as McCabe-Thiele for binary mixtures, or methodologies with a large number of variables, such as shortcut method for multicomponent mixtures. Therefore, it is necessary to look for design tools for distillers that are effective and practical. Excel proved thus to be one of the main tools used for such projects. The modeling developed in this software aims to help the Chemical Engineering students during the resolution of proposed exercises and to improve their critical analysis of the variation of the input variables in the design of distillers, being able to be adapted for several projects. The calculations were validated with solved problem from a famous book and with the support of a website, which does the equipment design.