The qualified preparation of technician chemistry students who will act directly in the operation and control of industrial chemical plants is a permanent challenge in the teaching-learning process, since such activities require a broad view of the process and a sum of knowledge’s areas such as unit operations, instrumentation and industrial process control. An alternative to better understand these chemical engineering subjects within the technician chemistry course is the use of didactic experiments, which aims to provide an approximation of the taught content in the classroom with practical operation in a dynamic way, facilitating the teaching-learning process. In this sense, this work aimed to propose to the students of the technician chemistry course integrated to high school to use their creativity, combined with the technical concepts studied in the classroom, to build didactic experiments of unit operations within the following topics: heat exchanger, adsorption, humidification and drying. The results were evaluated in the form of performance technical data and qualitative questionnaire. Results have evidenced the positive character in the teaching-learning process of the operating principles of the unit operations, besides allowing the students a direct contact with process control and industrial instrumentation.

ABSTRACT The present study addresses the novel application of the simulated annealing algorithm (SAA) to optimize the pressure-swing distillation (PSD) process for anhydrous ethanol purification. Three different softwares (Aspen Plus®, Excel® and Matlab®) were integrated to simultaneously optimize seven design and operational variables. The configuration with the best TAC represented a 40.2% saving per year in comparison to the non-optimized PSD. Such reduction was achieved by using the higher acceptance probability and the slower temperature decrement. This saving is mainly related to operational cost reductions, a fact that evidences the viability of using the herein described optimization methodology to improve the PSD design.

The fact that alpha- and beta-chitin adopt different arrays in the solid state is explored to emphasize their different properties and distinct spectral characteristics and X ray diffraction patterns. The methods for their extraction from the biomass in view of the preservation of their native structures and aiming to fulfill the claims of purity and uniformity for potential applications are discussed. The different arrays adopted by alpha- and beta-chitin also result in distinct reactivities toward the deacetylation reaction. Thus, the deacetylation of beta-chitin is more efficient owing to the better accessibility to amide groups due to the lower crystallinity of this polymorph.