All teaching and research laboratories for the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering are located in building 40. Laboratory time assignments are scheduled by the Academic Affairs Committee in coordination with the department chair as part of the teaching load distribution. The Program has two types of Lab facilities located in Buildings 40.

• Educational labs serving the undergraduate Program and
• Research labs used by some students in their research thesis projects.
• Educational Laboratories

The teaching and learning environment in the ChE Program is enhanced through an excellent correlation between required course offerings and the laboratory facilities. These integrated laboratory experiences offer students substantial opportunities for hands-on training and experience that makes their theoretical studies more meaningful. Instructional laboratories are spacious and equipped with instrumentation to perform both basic and advanced experiments and measurements

Educational laboratories, both their operation and development, are considered a priority in the department. The department has made an effort to integrate laboratory work with classroom instruction whenever possible.
Adequate laboratories are available to meet the course requirements. In cases when the number of students is too large for equipment/space available in a specific lab, such as unit operation and material science labs, the students are split into groups so that a reasonable number of students perform the experiment.

The Departmental Laboratories and Safety Committee (DLSC) consists of four faculty members and three technicians who are responsible for drawing up plans for future upgrades. They hold frequent meetings to discuss laboratory requirements and future planning. The DLSC also organize equipment orders and file them in the required form. The Chairman of the department forwards the recommendations of the laboratory committee to the Central University Budget Committee through the Deanship of the Faculty of Engineering.

This lab is used to instruct students about experimental aspects of heat treatment of metals and alloys. The lab is furnished with varieties of tube furnaces, muffle furnaces, vacuum furnaces and ovens.

This lab is used to instruct students about experimental aspects of the testing of materials, especially those related to the strength of materials. The lab is equipped with a number of mechanical testing machines such as fatigue, tensile, creep, impact, and hardness testing machines.

This lab is used to instruct students about experimental aspects and the application of metallographic techniques to study the structures of various materials. The lab is equipped with a range of equipment utilized for the metallographic preparation, microscopic studies, thermal processing, and mechanical characterization of various engineering materials including, metallic alloys, ceramics, polymers and composites. Microscopes, metallographic device and micro-hardness testers are also available in this lab.

This laboratory is for teaching various principles and techniques in corrosion measurements and some basics in electrochemistry. It is equipped with a multipurpose corrosion kit and cathodic protection.

The process control laboratory is equipped to demonstrate the fundamentals of feedback control theory, process measurements of temperature, level and concentration. This laboratory contains the following apparatus: temperature control unit, level control apparatus, PH control apparatus, process plant trainer and coupled tank apparatus.

This is the major fully dedicated lab for a full 3 credit hours course (ChE 435). This lab is used to instruct students about experimental aspects encountered in major industrial unit operation processes such as distillation, liquid/liquid extraction, sedimentation, drying, size reduction... etc.. This laboratory has the following equipment, some of which are of pilot-plant scale: plate and packed distillation column, liquid-liquid extraction pulsed packed column, tunnel dryer unit, double pipe heat exchanger, shell and tube heat exchanger, gas and liquid diffusion coefficient apparatus, sedimentation apparatus, screen analysis set, cooling tower and a computer-controlled distillation column.

The department has recently upgraded the computer laboratory with 48 new workstations with LCD monitors to serve the students. This laboratory has computer software applications such as Microsoft Office [Word, Excel, and Power-point], Polymath and Aspen_HYSYS.

This lab supports the course ChE 462. The experiments conducted in this laboratory are for testing petroleum products according to ASTM standards. The laboratory has the capabilities to carry out the following tests: salts in crude oil, lead in petroleum, oil content of petroleum waxes, copper strip corrosion, distillation of petroleum products, cloud and pour point of petroleum oils, conradson carbon residue, flash point by Fensky Martens closed cup methods, density, specific gravity, API gravity of petroleum products, refractive index of petroleum products and vapor pressure of petroleum products (Reid method).

II. Special Purpose Labs for Research Projects

This laboratory has a state-of-the-art surface analytical instrument (MAX 200) developed and manufactured by Leybold (German Company). It is a multi-technique electron and mass spectrometric device equipped with real time data system that facilitates completely unattended operations once the samples have been loaded into the high vacuum load lock. MAX 200 consists of various techniques that can be performed in one vacuum chamber under ultra-high vacuum conditions such as: XPS (X- Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy), AES (Auger Electron Spectroscopy), ISS (Ion Scattering spectroscopy), SAM (Scanning Auger Microscopy), SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry), SNMS (Secondary Neutral Mass Spectrometry, and RGA (Residual Gas Analysis).

The lab contains state-of-the-art modern instruments including a fully automated liquid phase reactor used for catalysts preparation. The laboratory also contains a fully automated surface area and pore size analyzer, used for characterization of catalysts and porous materials. It also contains a micropycnometer, oven, pressure batch reactors, and pressure controlled rotary evaporator. This lab supports research in the area of catalysis and it has been fully funded by the SABIC chair in Catalysis who was established in the department nine years ago.

This lab is used to instruct students about experimental aspects of wastewater testing and treatment. This laboratory supports course ChE 465. The lab is equipped with the following: sedimentation apparatus, oxygen analyzer, drying oven, the Jar test apparatus and turbidity meter, COD and BOD kit, aerobic bioreactor, rotating biological contactor unit and anaerobic digestion unit.

This laboratory has equipment for testing and mechanical characterization of various polymeric materials. Equipment for measuring density, melt-flow index, impact resistance and microtone and microscopes are used frequently.

The lab contains a variety of equipment used to study local ores such as clays and to study oil bleaching. This lab contains a state of the art fully automated microwave reactor, a ball mill, two Lovibond Tintometers, a set of hot plates, varieties of ovens, balances, and filtration units.

This laboratory supports analytical needs requirements for research. It contains a variety of analytical instruments including the atomic absorption spectrophotometer, spectrofluorometer, spectrophotometer and UV/visible spectrophotometer.

The equipment available in this lab is geared to be used in catalysis research especially those related to heterogeneous catalytic reactions. The lab contains the following equipment: two automated micro-reactor systems with online gas chromatographs to conduct gas-phase catalytic reactions, vacuum drying oven, muffle furnace with variable ramp settings, glove box, high pressure liquid phase reactor (5000 Psia – 350oC), and UV-Vis spectrophotometer.

This Laboratory is composed of two units. The imaging unit offers facilities of both Transmission and Scanning electron microscopes. The FEI- Tecnai-G20 Super Twin TEM is equipped with EDS and STEM options; there is also a set of sample preparation tools (Plasma cleaner, Ion Beam Miller, and Cutting, Dimpling…). The Quant FEG 450 SEM from FEI Company is equipped with a set of detectors (ETD, BSD, GBDS, LFD, STEM, EDS). These detectors used separately as well as a combination, cover a large field of applications: material, chemistry and biology.
The second unit is composed of a versatile INEL-EQ1000 X-Ray Diffractometer and XRF kit. The diffractometer is equipped with two wave lengths (Cu and Co), a couple of optics and a set of sample holders offering the possibility of measuring bulk, powder, metal, liquid…In addition the hardware facility there is a software package for phase identification and Rietveld refinement. The Amptek-XRF kit is equipped with Silver X-Ray source which can cover the whole periodic table

This lab is equipped with high voltage power supplies and automated injection and movement carriages devoted to research activities concerning the analysis and manufacturing of polymeric nanofibers. The process used in manufacturing is the electrospinning