Engineering Course

N. Friis and A. E. Hamielec, Principles of Polymer Reactor Design, in Polymer Reaction Engineering Course Notes, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, p.55. 

The new research frontiers in chemical engineering, some of which represent new applications for the discipline, have important implications for education. A continued emphasis is needed on basic principles that cut across many apphcations, but a new way of teaching those principles is also needed. Students must be exposed to both traditional and novel applications of chemical engineering. The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has set in motion a project to incorporate into undergraduate chemical engineering courses examples and problems from emerging applications of the discipline. The committee applauds this work, as well as recent AIChE moves to allow more flexibility for students in accredited departments to take science electives. 

Any fluid flow situation is described completely by momentum, mass, and energy balances. We have thus far looked at only simplified forms of the relevant balance equations for our simple models, as is done implicitly in aU engineering courses. It is interesting to go back to the basic equations and see how these simple approximations arise. We need to examine the full equations to determine the errors we are making in describing real reactors with... 

At the same time, as a chemist I was disappointed at the lack of serious chemistry and kinetics in reaction engineering texts. AU beat A B o death without much mention that irreversible isomerization reactions are very uncommon and never very interesting. Levenspiel and its progeny do not handle the series reactions A B C or parallel reactions A B, A —y C sufficiently to show students that these are really the prototypes of aU multiple reaction systems. It is typical to introduce rates and kinetics in a reaction engineering course with a section on analysis of data in which log-log and Anlienius plots are emphasized with the only purpose being the determination of rate expressions for single reactions from batch reactor data. It is typically assumed that ary chemistry and most kinetics come from previous physical chemistry courses. 

This text is focused primarily on chemical reactors, not on chemical kinetics. It is common that undergraduate students have been exposed to kinetics first in a course in physical chemistry, and then they take a chemical engineering kinetics course, followed by a reaction engineering course, with the latter two sometimes combined. At Minnesota we now have three separate courses. However, we find that the physical chemistry course... 

Schiigerl K, Lindemann C, Marose S, Scheper T (1998) In Berovic M (ed) Bioprocess Engineering Course, 27 Sep-2 Oct 1998, Brae, Croatia. National Institute of Chemistry, Supetar, pp 400-415... 

Not all the students in a chemical engineering course have mastered all the basic principles that have been taught, many students feel uncertain about their ability to transform basic theory into an engineering design... 

M. Ishida, Netsurikigaku (Thermodynamics, Principle and Application) in Creative Chemical Engineering Course 7, Baifuukan Pub., Tokyo (1997). 

Berovic M (1987) In Otocec YU (ed) Bioreactor engineering course. Boris Kidric and Slov Chemical Society, p 327... 

Milton C. Whitaker, in The Training of Chemical Engineers, Trans. AlChE 3, 158-168 (1910), advocated a laboratory containing real working models and staffed by technical experts from industries. Almost the whole address was also published in the rival J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 3, 36-39 (1910). What he actually did is reported in The New Chemical Engineering Course and Laboratories at Columbia University, Trans. AlChE 5, 150-169 (1912). For more on Whitaker, see C. F. Chandler s presentation, J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 15,199 (1923). The views of William H. Walker and Warren K. Lewis were recorded in A Laboratory Course for Chemical Engineering, J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 33, 618-624(1911). 

There is also a need for chemical reaction engineering courses to deal more thoroughly with the chemistry of the process under consideration. This is particularly important when both product quality and yield are the performance targets. The use of modem concepts of physical chemistry to make predictions of transport and rate parameters should also be emphasized, since such concepts show how the properties of a system affect these parameters. 

James Douglas What I am trying to say is that in reactor engineering courses we should spend some time on the interaction of the reactor with the process and consider the possibility of eliminating a conventional reactor. 

Robert Brown Is that why the combustion course and reaction engineering course are not combined ... 

Thomas Edgar At our school, electrical engineers take one chemistry course and that s it. They re intimidated by chemical engineering courses. 

These remarks raise several questions. Shall we continue to push the computer aggressively into the instruction of chemical engineering courses Who will create the educational software—faculty, software companies, or a collaboration of professional consultants with faculty If we make this aggressive push, how will we deal with the constant evolution of hardware and software systems These are the challenges to using the computer in education. I am interested in finding out what others have experienced. 

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