The "International Engineering Weeks – Spring 2021" were held at the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) in recent weeks. It was the second specialized event within the long-term international activity "International Engineering Project Weeks" (IEPW) in cooperation of IPE FME BUT with the Faculty of Mechanical and Process Engineering Augsburg University of Applied Sciences (FMPE AUAS), Germany. This year, however, the organizers and students tried out the online event for the first time.
Fig. 1.: The kick-off meeting of "IEPW-Spring 2021" was held virtually via MS Teams – this figure shows the importance and challenges of modeling the flow distribution in integrated process equipment.
The Spring International Engineering Project Weeks 2021 took place virtually from February 8 to March 5. The solved project topic was the computational analysis of fluid flow distribution in design of modern integrated equipment, which represents one of the key issues of reliable design in the field of process equipment. Although the current pandemic situation prevented related experimental research in the IPE laboratories, students could immerse themselves even more deeply in numerical modeling using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Six FMPE AUAS students (Maximilian Kraus, Florian Mesch, Niklas Raimann, Jonathan Sailer, Anatol Stohr, Lukas Ströll) actively participated in the solution of this research-engineering project under the leadership of a selected team of IPE PhD students coordinated by PhD student Ing. Dominika Babička Fialová, the consulting assistance of an international organizational team. The project supervisor was Assoc. Prof. Z. Jegla, who, together with Prof. Dr.-Ing. M. Reppich, is also the guarantor of the IEPW.
Fig. 2.: Students from AUAS discuss their CFD models prepared in Ansys Fluent with the IPE team during one of the regular meetings (19. 2. 2021)
Fig. 3.: The final presentation of the project results given by students from FMPE AUAS
Despite certain limitations that arose from the reality of virtual events, all participants evaluated this several-week intensive engineering meeting of students, PhD students, and teachers as a very successful event, which met all the set goals of the project topic. The next IEPW is already planned for the second half of this calendar year when the intended "Autumn International Engineering Project Weeks 2021" will be held for other interested students and PhD students from both partner universities.
Fig. 4.: The final defense of students' results in front of the members of the implementation committee