A Digital Reality Pilot Plant for Research and Learning

Technological advancements increase the demand for more diverse skill sets across industry. To meet this growing demand, digitally-based education and training interventions are a common solution. For practical skills development, digital tools have the potential to increase the capacity of provisioned educational experiences by allowing more people to be trained on more skills using less physical infrastructure.

Having analyzed the learning objectives for several PILOT PLANT courses delivered at the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Department at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU-KT), eight broad competencies have been identified across undergraduate and graduate programs. These competencies, for which the learning objectives are intended, is for the effective operation of a number of unit operations.

One way to map these competencies to the respective unit operations and their corresponding theoretical frameworks is via two cognitive interfaces. The first of these interfaces is concerned with cognition and learning whilst the second is concerned with User and spatial Interaction. An educational virtual reality (VR) platform is currently being developed and implemented at DTU-KT.

It is designed to introduce learners to the physical structures and components that make up a unit operation, whilst demonstrating the functionality and processes for which the unit operation is intended. This paper will start out by presenting the cognitive framework that was designed and utilized for the design of digital reality learning tools at the PILOT PLANT at DTU-KT.

Thereafter, it will present a design study for the recently developed 360° VR learning tool that was developed for a Citric Acid Crystallizer.