Educational Experience Developed Between Industry and University for Students of a Course of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer for Chemical Engineers

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) today are recognizing the value in building relationships with industry. To foster educational innovation between HEI and industries the Tecnologico de Monterrey (TdM) has developed different types of collaboration agreements with industry members called Training Partners to propose and define challenges to be tackled by students. In this context, an educational innovation was developed as a collaboration between the company NUTEC Bickley (NB) and TdM to develop a simplified solution to determine fuel and air consumption as well as the efficiency of an intermittent furnace and verify results using CFD. The presented collaboration between TdM and NB allowed students to see the relevance of the application in a real situation for the contents of the chemical engineering course of design of systems for heat transfer. The final results shows that 1,390.7 kg of fuel are required during the 99 hours of furnace operation and the furnace efficiency obtained is 36.3 %. Any increase in insulation thickness will marginally contribute to improve the furnace efficiency and the best improvements in efficiency can be obtained by recovering energy from exhaust gases. The comparisons of the solution proposed with CFD simulations shows that the simplified solution is a good approximation for simulation, estimating fuel consumption with less than 10% of difference. This experience is a good example of how the collaboration between industry and universities can be beneficial, by improving the learning process showing real cases to students and developing solutions that may helpful and quite simple to apply.