The purpose of this work is to develop an evolutionary procedure to be used by Chemical Engineering students for the base-case design of a Vanadium Redox-Flow Battery. The design methodology is based on the work of Douglas (1985) and provides a profitability analysis at each decision level so that more profitable alternatives and directions can be…

This article addresses the importance of oral communication and many of its fundamental underlying principles. Emphasis is placed on oral presentations, particularly those used in science and engineering. Following this, the author provides a brief outline of an elective graduate level oral communications course that was developed and utilized to…

The design course is an integral part of chemical engineering education. A novel approach to the design course was recently introduced at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The course aimed to introduce students to systematic tools and techniques for setting and evaluating performance targets for processes, as well as…

Within the past 15 years, three North American pulp mills experienced catastrophic equipment failures while using 50 wt% hydrogen peroxide. In two cases, explosions occurred when normal pulp flow was interrupted due to other process problems. To understand the accidents, a kinetic model of alkali-catalyzed decomposition of peroxide was developed.…

We present a simplified human alcohol metabolism model for a mass balance team project. Students explore aspects of engineering in biotechnology: designing/modeling biological systems, testing the design/model, evaluating new conditions, and exploring cutting-edge "lab-on-a-chip" research. This project highlights chemical engineering's impact on…

This paper deals with the use of commercial CFD software in teaching graduate level computational fluid dynamics. FLUENT 6.3.26 was chosen as the CFD software to teach students the entire CFD process in a single course. The course objective is to help students to learn CFD, use it in some practical problems and analyze as well as validate the…

A web database of solved problems has been created to enable faculty to incorporate biological applications into core courses. Over 20% of US ChE departments utilized problems from the website, and 19 faculty attended a workshop to facilitate teaching the modules. Assessment of student learning showed some gains related to biological outcomes, as…

We developed a new interdisciplinary course on pharmaceuticals to address needs of undergraduate and graduate students in chemical engineering and other departments. This course introduces drug design, development, and delivery in an integrated fashion that provides scientific depth in context with broader impacts in business, policy, and ethics.…

Three undergraduate students functioned as teaching assistants in unit ops lab for their senior project, which included developing a purchased size exclusion chromatography experiment, supervising the running of this experiment, and assisting the junior students with their calculations. They also read the reports, graded them, and commented on…

Continuous feed and bleed ultrafiltration, modeled with the gel polarization model for the limiting flux, is shown to provide a rich source of non-linear algebraic equations that can be readily solved using numerical and graphical techniques familiar to undergraduate students. We present a variety of numerical problems in the design, analysis, and…

At present, due to the overall adaptation to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a new concept regarding the teaching methodology was thought to be essential for engineering subjects. In this paper we describe our experience teaching the altered content of the courses on two classical subjects; Chemical Reactors (Chemical Engineering) and…

This contribution outlines a strategy to counteract literature lethargy and train beginning and continuing undergraduate and graduate researchers in a professor's research group to efficiently learn from and critique archival journal articles. Journal Club is a weekly one-credit-hour class where a research article related to each research…

This paper describes a student laboratory experiment to determine the molecular weight of a polymer sample by measuring the viscosity of dilute polymer solutions in a PDMS microfluidic viscometer. Sample data are given for aqueous solutions of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO). A demonstration of shear thinning behavior using the microviscometer is…

The transport of potassium permanganate between two continuous-stirred vessels was investigated to help chemical and biomedical engineering students understand two-compartment pharmacokinetic models. Concepts of modeling, mass balance, parameter estimation and Laplace transform were applied to the two-unit process. A good agreement was achieved…

The importance of distillation in the separation field prompts the inclusion of distillation experiments in the chemical engineering curricula. This work describes the performance of an Oldershaw column in the rectification of a cyclohexane/n-heptane mixture. Total reflux distillation, continuous rectification under partial reflux, and batch…