UG Research Experience 1.0

 ~ Rajat Daga

After attending a few non-core talks and juxtaposing core and non-core through various blogs, I realized my inclination towards core Chemical Engineering after the 3rd semester. I thought of exploring major fields in Chemical Engineering by doing related projects but was thoroughly confused regarding the area. I, along with a couple of my friends, decided to try out Fluid dynamics since Prof. Rochish Thaokar’s teaching enthralled us. We reached out to Rochish sir after one of the classes, and he was happy to accommodate the three of us for the project. We were further motivated after the project brief given by Rochish sir mainly because of the tangible influence it would have on the chemical, especially petrochemical industry.

Project Description

We were assigned different projects to work upon as a part of the summer project. My project aimed at studying the effect of electric field on the rate of coalescence of water droplets in a water-in-oil emulsion. The industries which could benefit from this project were mainly petrochemical industry in desalters- an equipment used to separate entrained water droplets from crude oil. The initial step was to read several related research papers and relevant books to acquire the appropriate skill set required for the project. Reading various references took us about a month since we were facing difficulties in understanding the complicated math involved but finally completed it. The final half of the project involved using the Population Balance Method to simulate water droplets in a container filled with crude oil in MATLAB and the subsequent movement and coalescence of water droplets to find the time required for complete separation of water and oil. The simulation involved separating vessels in numerous sections and analysing the motion of water droplets in these sections using the velocity equation prescribed in literature.

Experience with Professor

We were assigned a PhD student to discuss our doubts and progress of the project. Though the PhD student had his PhD project to finish, he did not show reluctance in having frequent meetings. Though we did not have regular meetings with the professor, he was easily approachable. He gave us independence in deciding the timeline of the project. He also shared methods based on his experience to get past difficulties experienced while working on a project to achieve significant results. These somewhat helped me get past some of my problems. After completion of the duration of the project, Rochish sir was generous enough to give his recommendation for URA-01.

Learning Values

Apart from enhancing our knowledge on the subject, this project imparted imported values like patience and maintaining equanimity on encountering a problematic situation. There had been quite a lot of frustrating moments like getting stuck on a particular part of reading material, not being able to make progress after getting stuck for days. There were also pleasant moments, usually when we got out of this frustration. Through this project, we learnt the importance of being systematic in approach as it eliminates the risk of minor mistakes and also makes bugs easier to spot. We also came to know the importance of making comments wherever needed to make our work understandable even for a layperson, partly because of the difficulty faced while following reference codes which did not have a definition for the myriad variables used.