Fundamentals of Chemical Engineering

How do you make water safe to drink? How do you capture hazardous emissions to protect the environment? How do you create energy, food, medicines and other products that are essential to our everyday lives? This subject begins with a broad overview of the environmental and social challenges facing humanity that require chemical engineering solutions, as well as the wide variety of jobs available to chemical engineers. The subject will then focus on a series of foundational competencies that chemical engineers need to understand to address these big picture problems. It will introduce flow diagrams for conceiving processes in new ways, building up to reading detailed engineering schematics. These will draw on real case studies like how chocolate bars are made, how petroleum is refined and how pharmaceuticals are manufactured. Students will then investigate a processing facility by building their own bench-scale plant. Students will have the opportunity to use a hands-on tools workshop to build equipment ranging from small valves and temperature sensors up to larger-scale equipment, which can be assembled into a final flow rig. Understanding how the equipment works will drive questions about the underlying physics, such as thermodynamics (for designing heat transfer equipment) and reaction kinetics (for building reactors), which will be discussed in accompanying classes. At the end of the subject, all parts will be drawn back together into a single flow rig with an accompanying piping and instrumentation diagram, a detailed schematic for designing and controlling the plant.