Chemical Engineering Summer Camp: Separation Science & Water Filtration
For undergrad and graduate chemical engineering education, Su and Calabrese taught Mass Transfer and Separations courses at UIUC (ChBE 422) and UMN (ChEn3006), providing a unique opportunity to train future engineers on emerging separations technologies.
For K–12 outreach, the UIUC team organized a summer camp for the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) program and a Women Focused Summer camp, Catalyzing UR Interest in Engineering (CURIE) at UIUC. Shukla directed this week-long camp, which hosted 22 high schoolers (over 50% of the students are female) interested in pursuing chemical engineering in college. The camp involves visits to chemical plants, hands-on lab sessions and mentoring sessions with female faculty, graduate and undergraduate students.
As part of the lectures and lab activities, Su gave a talk which introduced the separation techniques and highlighted the water scarcity and the importance of wastewater treatment. Furthermore, the Su group organized a hands-on demonstration focused on water purification that students needed to use different materials and construct a filter for wastewater treatment. By the end of the experiment session, Su not only demonstrated the idea design of the filter which can finally get the clean water but also described the functions and the separation techniques of each material in the filter.