STUDENTS BUILDING DIDACTIC EXPERIMENTS AS A TOOL FOR TEACHING UNIT OPERATIONS AND PROCESS CONTROL FOR CHEMISTRY TECHNICIANS

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.