Education

Freshman-level Design Projects for Chemical Engineers

It is notoriously difficult to provide beginning chemical engineering students with real-world experiences.  Many classroom activities designed to engage early engineering students involve concepts from mechanical or civil engineering (e.g., team challenges to build structures with constraints on available materials). These types of activities do not translate well to chemical engineering, where safety considerations associated with chemicals make it difficult for students to explore different alternatives to problems until later in their education.  To overcome these challenges, we formulated a series of team design problems suitable for first-year chemical engineering students.  Students had to combine basic material balance calculations with simple process economics calculations to make design decisions.  Several problems were based on a classic trade-off in chemical process design, whereby increasing the production rate of a valuable product increases sales profits, but also increases utility costs for operating the process, and thus there is an optimum product flow rate that maximizes profit.

Example problems provided here are all based on processes that can be analyzed using material balances for non-reactive systems.  The problems are open-ended, in that students are not given enough concentrations and flow rates to completely specify the process.  In a typical problem, students are asked to determine the mass flow rate of the product to maximize profit.  Some problems contain additional considerations; for example, input streams that are only available seasonally, uncertainty in labor costs, or decisions on whether to operate in continuous or batch mode.

Professional Development Curricula 

In recent years, both government agencies and industry have emphasized the need for a well-trained engineering workforce in order to maintain U.S. competitiveness.  We believe it is important for students to receive formal training in effectively working in teams and creating respectful and welcoming workplace environments. Initially, we incorporated this training into the required undergraduate Chemical Engineering curriculum at UMass Amherst.  Since the project’s inception, the curriculum has been modified to include undergraduate REU students, three interdisciplinary graduate programs at both UMass and Stony Brook University, and the "Tools in Chemistry" course at Stony Brook University. New course materials and exercises were developed and added to existing “Professional Development” courses for undergraduate, REU, and graduate students. 

The course served as the basis for Prof. Bhatia's invited participation in the 2009 Frontiers of Engineering Education workshop, hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  It was also one of 29 curricula that were selected to be included in the 2012 NAE publication "Infusing Real World Experiences into Engineering Education." A pdf of this report is below, and you can find more information about it here.  Flip to page 23 to see a lovely picture of Prof. Bhatia leading a class discussion, which was not at all staged.