We have included mostly everything we’ve learned/done from Week 1 to Week 8 into our final report and presentation of lycopene extraction.
All of our experimental conclusions are as follows:
• Higher temperatures (up to 50°C) and smaller particle sizes (down to 1 turn of the burr grinder) increase coffee concentrations over time.
• Increased coffee:water ratio (up to 10 g/200 mL) maintains the same extraction ratio over time and increases coffee concentration over time.
• Coffee filters are better at extracting coffee than paper towels.
We have already created a final PFD of lycopene extraction in Week 7 based on our experimental results. So, in this section, we will reflect on the limitations of our coffee experiments. Since we could only use basic kitchenware for the experiments, our results are not as accurate as experiments done in a lab. However, this method is a good start to get an idea of how engineers and chemists think, learn, and conduct experiments in the real world. It has also helped some of us decide what path we want to take as a major in chemical engineering. In the future, we hope to apply what we learned here in our job industry, as well as improve our engineering skills.