It is widely recognized that a hands-on laboratory experience is useful in control engineering education. Herein, the students overcome the main gaps between theoretical knowledge and experimental setups. Nowadays, in times of crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual and remote laboratories are emerging as primary educational resources. However, in virtual labs, the students are not exposed to real life issues (i.e., equipment problems, noise, etc.) while in remote labs, communication and connectivity problems arise (i.e., network security, synchronization management, internet speed, etc.). Henceforth, this work presents an unpublished educational project named Lab-Tec@Home, and the aim of this research is to expand the access of hands-on control education at the undergraduate level. Here, students easily assemble a cost-effective laboratory kit at home and use it on their own computing devices connected with the external MATLAB/Simulink^TM application. Thus, students can test and validate theoretical concepts of control engineering such as: system model identification, and PID control design and test. The assessment results show that the proposed educational project enhances the learning experience and has outstanding positive feedback of more than 290 students who undertook massive flexible digital courses at Tecnologico de Monterrey. This makes the proposed educational project mainly suitable for control engineering courses.

The aim of this paper is to present an alternative to conventional biodiesel production by taking advantage of the flow patterns formed in micro-reactors. Biodiesel production was carried out 15 times faster in a tubular micro-reactor (TMR) than a well-mixed batch reactor (BR), achieving conversions up to ∼99% with 4 min of residence time. The experimental results were analyzed using dimensionless numbers and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The CFD results showed that under the conditions used in the present study, the slug flow pattern can be expected, and this could explain the high conversion (>90%) reached in the TMR without using high methanol-oil molar ratios. The internal movement (auto-mixing) in the slug enhanced the mass transfer. Moreover, CFD simulations showed that at low conversion (<25%), the internal velocity of the oil slug will be the key factor related to the reactor performance.

This work presents the Campus City initiative followed by the Challenge Living Lab platform to promote research, innovation, and entrepreneurship with the intention to create urban infrastructure and creative talent (human resources) that solves different community, industrial and government Pain Points within a Smart City ecosystem. The main contribution of this work is to present a working model and the open innovation ecosystem used in Tecnologico de Monterrey that could be used as both, a learning mechanism as well as a base model for scaling it up into a Smart Campus and Smart City. Moreover, this work presents the Smart Energy challenge as an example of a pedagogic opportunity for the development of competencies. This included the pedagogic design of the challenge, the methodology followed by the students and the results. Finally, a discussion on the findings and learnings of the model and challenge implementation. Results showed that Campus City initiative and the Challenge Living Lab allows the identification of highly relevant and meaningful challenges while providing a pedagogic framework in which students are highly motivated, engaged, and prepared to tackle different problems that involve government, community, industry, and academia.