May 21, 2024
In a cross-disciplinary study recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education and featured on the May issue’s front cover, a team of WPI researchers from the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, and the Interactive Media and Game Development program developed a mixed-reality program to introduce flow chemistry tools to undergraduate students. The study is titled “FlowAR: A Mixed Reality Program to Introduce Continuous Flow Concepts.”
Flow chemistry is an approach whereby chemical reactions occur in smaller volumes while flowing through a reactor when compared to the traditional approach of batch chemical reactions. Flow chemistry has a multitude of benefits including safety, investment savings, and green processing.
This study, led by Professor Robert Dempski, focused on comparing whether users could more readily assemble a continuous flow reactor using written instructions versus an Augmented Reality (AR)-based program, named FlowAR. The results showed that students who used FlowAR reported having a better training experience and enjoyed assembling the reactor more than students who used a traditional approach. This work shows that complex manual assembly of instrumentation can be more readily accomplished with a well-designed AR-based program. This is an exciting development to help train the workforce of the future.
Authors of the study include Lane Harrison, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science; Andrew Teixeira, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering; Noëlle Rakotondravony, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science; Max Chen, a PhD student in the Interactive Media and Game Development Program; Yichen (Claire) Li, a PhD student in the Interactive Media and Game Development Program; and Hilson Shrestha, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science.
