presented in this work. A mass transfer experiment in a bench scale reactor (stirred and aerated) had to be studied by mixed teams, thus emulating challenges that will be common in future working environments. In order to perform the experiment, students in Brazil and in France were put into groups. The students had to make decisions about the procedure for executing the experiments. All the students were able to control the equipment, no matter where they were physically. Students communicated using video conference software. The students' and teachers' opinions of this experience were very positive. This methodology is an important contribution to the education of engineers in a world integrated by modern communication technologies.

This work presents an experimental study of hydrodynamic behaviour and mass transfer performance of ceramic foam (SiC) as column packing. Voidage of the foam studied is of 91% with 640 m2/m3 specific area and 5 PPI. Hydrodynamics experiments are realised with air-water system in counter current in a 150 mm diameter column with a packing height of one meter. Parameters studied are pressure drop for dry and wet packing, flooding and liquid hold-up. Total reflux experiments with n-heptane/cyclohexane mixture were carried out in a distillation column at atmospheric pressure to study mass transfer by determination of HETP (Height Equivalent to Theoretical Plate). The performance in terms of pressure drop per unit height and flooding are quite lower in comparison with classical packings of distillation. The pressure drop obtained is about few millibars per meter (0-10 mbar.m-1) for F-Factor from the range of 0 to 1 and liquid superficial velocities from 1 to 10 m3m-2h-1. Liquid hold-up values, measured in the same range of flow, are in a range of 5 to 10%. The possible application of foam as a packing for distillation is so demonstrated.

Distillation is the most applied separation technology. However, its major drawback is the low thermodynamic efficiency (typically around 10%). In response to environmental issues that concern energy consumption of distillation columns, HIDiC (heat integrated distillation column) is expected to have a large impact on energy saving. The aim of this study is to optimize the HIDiC sensitive parameters so as to minimize the Total Annual Cost (TAC). For this, a HIDiC simulation model is developed by using commercial software ProSimPlus. GA (Genetic Algorithm) is used to find the optimal HIDiC configuration where multivariable are optimized without initialization. Binary (Benzene/Toluene) separation case is examined. As a result, 7.4 % and 13.9 % TAC reductions are realized in comparison with the reported solutions in previous works.