Pupils Visit the Process Engineering Labs
From pocket warmers to frozen pizza: pupils visit the process engineering labs
Photo: FVST
Young visitors in old facilities: Within the framework of this year's Autumn Uni, seven 12th grade pupils used the opportunity to explore the experimental facilities of the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics. They learned about various combustion apparatuses employed in process engineering along with their industrial application.
The chair’s PhD students demonstrated the scientific goal of process simulation to the pupils on shaft and rotary kilns using small experiments. The soon-to-be secondary school graduates are able to transfer this new knowledge on heat transfer via conduction, convection, and radiation to everyday life: The next time they prepare a frozen pizza, they will remember exactly why convection requires a lower temperature for the same baking time than two-sided heating.
The students were given insight into the spectrum of process and systems engineering using pocket warmers. These are latent heat storage systems, in which the heat is stored in a "hidden" manner. The supercooled liquid is in a metastable state and requires a trigger to transition to the energetically favorable solid phase state at room temperature. Clicking a metal disk is the trigger. The crystallization energy released during the phase change ultimately provides the students with warm hands during the winter.
Some of the visitors may return to the OvGU for the MINT internship, where they can get to the bottom of exciting questions of heat, flow, and particle technology. Perhaps there were even a few future process engineering students among them.
Contact: Jakob Seidenbecher, M. Sc., Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics (ISUT)
phone: +49 391 67-57073, e-mail: jakob.seidenbecher@ovgu.de