A new paradigm for development, growth and employment in engineering communities

Abstract

Through crowd sourcing, our group created Scilab code for 75,000 solved examples from 600+ standard textbooks of engineering and science. As it is a great resource to set lab assignments, exam questions, etc., this Scilab resource is an extremely useful resource for academics. There is no comparable resource in Matlab. DWSIM is a great open source alternative to Aspen Plus and other commercial simulators. As it has been developed during the past decade, it is based on modern technologies with concomitant benefits: natural and attractive interface, ability to add property database and thermodynamic routines, ability to create custom models using Python and Scilab, and the ability to call it from external resources. Students from across India have created 130 flowsheets, which are available as open source. Work on another 100 flowsheets is under progress. About to embark on a lot of custom model creation through crowdsourcing. Ideas for these models will also come from the industry.

Bio

Kannan M. Moudgalya is an Erach and Meheroo Mehta Advanced Education Technology Chair Professor at IIT Bombay. He has been with the Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Bombay for 31 years. He is also an associate faculty of Systems and Control at IIT Bombay. Kannan studied chemical engineering at IIT Madras and Rice university, receiving B.Tech and Ph.D degrees, respectively. He also received a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from Rice University, studying Control and Computer Engineering. Kannan has written two textbooks: (1) Digital Control, published by John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, in 2007 and (2) Optimization: theory and practice, jointly with M. C. Joshi, published by Narosa, New Delhi, in 2004. Kannan’s group has been extending OpenModelica to Chemical Engineering. In particular, they have created thermodynamic and unit operations library, using which one can simulate chemical process plants. Kannan is now devoting his time on spreading education on a massive scale, without quality dilution. He has been focusing on spoken tutorials, open source software systems, virtual labs and affordable laptops. He believes that it is possible to provide high quality education to all our children through a combination of education, and information and communication technologies, making India a developed country in the process.

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