Research and Development Facility

Paul Rodriguez and a VMC in the CNC shop.

Research and Development Facility Supports Upgrade of Undergraduate Lab

Polymerization Unit

Rodriguez and his team agree that the best part of their jobs is that “the work is challenging and always changing.” This work includes everything from actually designing the working parts of experiments using AutoCAD and FeatureCAM to building the experiments themselves, putting them in functional order, and maintaining their performance. One example of this is the Polymerization Unit. The Research and Development Facility team was given a picture of a similar unit and its description, worked with Professor Kerry Dooley to reduce the scale, then built a unit to suit the specific needs of the Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Lab.

Perhaps the most important and challenging role that the Research and Development Facility has played in recent years has been in assisting the rest of the Chemical Engineering Department in improving the Undergraduate Lab. Over $3 million in funding has gone into making improvements to the Undergraduate Lab and hence to undergraduate education in general. Dr. Dooley and Dr. Carl Knopf were extremely instrumental in acquiring this funding. Asked how the Research and Development Facility sees itself as helping to increase the quality of undergraduate education, Rodriguez first points to overall facility improvements. When he began his job twenty years ago, the facility had one piece of heavy equipment: a manual milling machine. This machine is still going strong, but beside it now sits a brand-spanking new computerized milling machine, and a computerized lathe.

Frederick McKenzie

Lab computers have also been upgraded and made to interface with such experiments in last two years. Rodriguez credits Dr. Dooley and Jeremy Landry, the department’s computer science intern, with assisting the machine shop in this effort. All of these improvements, including updating classrooms to include an overhead projection system, have made undergraduate students very happy.

Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) Shop

A mill was the first piece of machinery in the CNC Shop.

An important part of the Research and Development Facility is a Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) Shop. The CNC Shop is free of the grinding particulates generated by many types of tools. Machines in the CNC Shop are sensitive and must be free of such particulates in order to function properly.

Joe Bell in the CNC shop

According to Chairman Carl Knopf and the Research and Development Facility Manager Paul Rodriguez, the Department of Chemical Engineering is fortunate to have such a facility. Most universities do not have CNC Shops, and they are key in the production of high-grade research equipment.

The CNC Shop is housed in the old chemical engineering building and includes a computer-controlled lathe and mill.

This page was last modified on January 28, 2004