Operating A Chemical Plant Using Augmented Reality
Using an augmented reality (AR) platform, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Rochester in New York is developing an innovative way for his students to understand and conduct chemical reactions. While simple in its design—webcam, computer, projector, and a pane of glass—the AR tabletop is impressive in its execution. This teaching experiment, developed in Professor Andrew White’s lab, turned out to have some interesting implications for the chemical industry, as well.
In augmented reality, the coffee mugs transformed into 10-cubic meter reactors—both plug flow and continuous stirred-tank reactors—and the popsicle sticks were suddenly pipes used to connect them. Student’s also had a nob which allowed them to adjust each reactor’s temperature as it was added to the configuration. Cameras captured reactor locations, and then this information was relayed to a computer, which was hooked up to a projector that displayed the results of the simulations onto the tabletop.
Even further, White and his collaborators—graduate students, Heta Gandhi and Rainier Barrett, and Dr. April Leuhmann and Dr. Brendan Mort—hope to work with the Rochester Museum & Science Center to develop an AR platform for simulating oil spills at the molecular level. White says the platform has the potential to be part of the conversation regarding the use of oil dispersants during a spill. The impact these dispersants have on wildlife is highly contended, and White and his colleagues believe AR could “allow people to try to design an oil surfactant and test its performance to separate oil and water with a molecular dynamics simulation while at the same time using QSAR modeling to assess its toxicity.” They also have future plans to develop a way to “control where a dispersant is injected in an interactive oil spill.”
See the full story here: https://www.chem.info/article/2018/03/operating-chemical-plant-using-augmented-reality