Laboratory for Functional Nanostructures
LABFUN

Previously Taught

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CH241 [3:0] Nanotechnology (Aug 2010)

            class handouts 

CH204 [4:0] Chemical Reaction Engineering

(Jan 2009)  (with Prof. K. Kesava Rao)

• Outline   KKR CRE Notes

CH206 1:2 - Experimental Methods in Chemical Engineering (Discontinued!)

Course Objective: 

This course  aims to help students improve their experimentation skills using experiments that are designed to elucidate various principles of chemical engineering. The pedagogical objectives are three-fold: a) to inculcate the ability to observe and systematically record practical phenomena b) to develop the skill of writing clear technical reports describing experiments and c) to teach methods for analysis and interpretation of experimental data.Course structure and grading policyThe course is organised into two parts, namely lecture and laboratory sessions. There will be one lecture hour and two laboratory sessions (three hour duration each) every week. During the first few  sessions, faculty members will discuss issues related to report writing, ethics, and laboratory safety. One session will also be used to provide a summary of relevant statistical methods. The rest of the lectures will be devoted to the methods of statistical inference and illustrating their importance in the interpretation of measured data. During the laboratory sessions, groups of three students each are required to perform four different experiments with each experiment being allotted five laboratory sessions. After completing an experiment the group is expected to submit a report within one week. A lab notebook will be provided for recording all observations pertaining to the experiments, including detailed description of procedure (in your own words) . The lab notebook has to be initialled by the instructor/TA after every laboratory session. Report preparation involves producing a report with different sections that read smoothly.   The grades for the course will be decided by four factors: attendance and participation in class – 5%, quiz – 20%, experimental tasks – 50%, final presentation – 25%. Attendance of lectures and laboratory sessions is mandatory and any unexcused absence will result in a ‘F’ grade. A quiz will be conducted at the end of the semester based on the lectures. Each student will be randomly assigned one of the experiments at the end of the semester, in order to prepare a presentation during the third week of April. The presentation will be for about 20 minutes and a committee of faculty members will evaluate this presentation and quiz the student on all aspects of that experiment. The final letter grades will be based on the following scheme: S – 100-86, A – 85-71, B – 70-61, C – 60-51, D – 50-41, F – <41.

Useful links

• CH206 Handout Ethics  Report writing slides Report writing handout

• UT Austin- Engineering Communications Course

E1  E2  E3  E4 E5    UV-Vis Instructions  Lab Safety Instructions
 

Writing Assignment & Model Solution

• Significant figures calculator

• Linus Pauling's Lab Notebooks

• Academic Conference Poster Tips

• Videos of proper Laboratory Practices

• Summary of Statistical Methods

• Relevant Statistical tables

• Uncertainities and Error Propagation

• Regression software for kinetics - Kintecus

• Non-linear least squares curve fitting

• Curve fitting packages

• Online Engineering Statistics Handbook

• Online Statistics Textbook

• Statistical Engineering

• Common Errors in Statistics

• Single Digit Representations of Natural Numbers 

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