The distillation column lies on the first and second floors of Acopian Engineering Center.
For fans of children’s shows “Dexter’s Laboratory” or “Lab Rats,” Lafayette College engineering has something that looks similarly high-tech.
Located in Acopian Engineering Center’s first and second floors lies Lafayette’s state-of-the-art Unit Operations Laboratory for chemical engineering classes and research.
Among many other high-tech tools — including a bioreactor set up, whatever that means — the laboratory houses a whopping two-story-tall distillation column.
Anyone who has survived an organic chemistry lab is familiar with distillation, just on a much smaller scale. The large column is used to separate liquid mixtures based on their boiling points through vaporization.
“This is something that you see at some larger universities, but you won’t even necessarily see it at all larger universities,” said chemical engineering professor Michael Senra. “Universities of Lafayette’s size probably don’t have anything like this.”
Senra said this laboratory would provide students with “real hands-on experience” in a laboratory with “equipment that they’re going to very likely see in their careers in industry.”
“Operations isn’t ideal,” Bella Harrill ‘26 said about real-world engineering. “A lot of the work that you do in your classes is assuming certain things, and that’s not actually how operations work.”
Harrill saw the Unit Operations Laboratory during a tour of Lafayette, noting that she thought it was “the coolest thing ever” as a prospective chemical engineering student.
Fellow chemical engineering student Griffen Kempskie ‘26 utilized the lab for his research on the efficiencies of different catalysts in biodiesel reactions.
“I think it gives a really good idea of all of the things that can go wrong in an actual process,” Kempskie said. “It just gives the experience of troubleshooting and figuring out why data is the way it is. Getting better at practically understanding how you can make equipment give you data that’s actually useful.”
Chemical engineering major Madison Horvath ‘26 also said she first saw the lab during a tour of Lafayette and began working in it her freshman year while doing research for a drug delivery project.
“With the distillation column, that’s something that’s super common in industry, but it’s not super common in undergraduate education,” Horvath said. “It’s the fact that we get to use it and analyze the data and do the whole thing is something that’s really cool because not everybody gets to do that.”