Shams El Nawawi, Siang Lim, Athanasios Kritharis and Joshua Donaldson attended the 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineering Conference from October 27th to November 1st where they presented a workshop on CHBeer, UBC Envision’s Automated brewing project.
Fermentation is a process many chemical engineers are familiar with and researching and refining the fermentation process can prove to be quite difficult as it is a biological system. CHBeer incorporates many chemical engineering fundamentals with custom instrumentation, software development and machine learning to produce a small process plant (with a product we are passionate about).
In Minneapolis we presented our project to over one-hundred chemical engineering students who are interested in starting up their own brewing project. We even started a website that points students in the direction of where to start with their own brewing project. We met with students all around the continent and discussed our respective programs. Attending various workshops on thermodynamics, nuclear energy, and big data analysis showed those of us who attended where the industry and research is headed. Attending workshops on chemical engineering education gave us research and educational ideas to discuss with professors and the CHBE administration. We talked to students from the United States Military Academy where they started the Kicking Mule Brewery. They brew on a much larger scale and are specifically researching the yeast kinetics.
We also met with a supervisor at Honeywell UOP where he and his team are doing similar real-time data processing learning in the oil sector.
We found the conference to be extremely educational and informative. We are incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to present our project and meet with such incredible influential people in the Chemical Engineering field.
