Integrating smart manufacturing techniques into undergraduate education: A case study with heat exchanger

The process systems domain is undergoing the fourth industrial revolution, which is helping industries digitize and optimize their production techniques. Concurrently, the field of data-based modeling has been expanding, leading to the proposal of many fault detection models. However, the rapid expansion has created gaps in the field. For instance, Smart Manufacturing (SM) methodologies have yet to be incorporated into undergraduate chemical engineering education. Additionally, only a few developed fault detection models have been deployed for real-time usage and practical applications. This study takes a crucial step toward bridging the two mentioned gaps by enabling undergraduate students to learn SM techniques and developing a safe and controlled academic environment for deploying fault detection models. The demonstration is implemented on a shell and tube heat exchanger, taught in a senior year laboratory course, using the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (SMIP). The implementation provides an easily customizable pipeline for SM applications involving human-in-the-loop decision-making on a real-life hardware system. Actual data from heat exchanger equipment is used to train and compare the performances of several state-of-the-art fault detection models, including fully connected, convolutional, and recurrent neural networks. Current work also presents tutorials on deploying models for practical real-time applications using the SMIP. The overall architecture is a plug-and-play package that will motivate students to learn about SM and catalyze their interest in developing and deploying fault detection models using real-world data.