I have attached my slide show from Junior Parent's Weekend. In it I give some evidence for the central importance of chemical engineering in societal issues, such as health care and energy --even to the point that prominent chemists think that they should merge departments with chemical engineers! I also give some advice that students should work on "quick draw" implementation of the technical skills that they have. A number of examples of real world situations in which a chemical engineer can give first order quantitative insight are given. A second recommendation is to better develop conversational skills that include being able to talk about engineering in a mature way and being able to link engineering into other aspects of society -- which necessarily include economic and financial topics. A third recommendation is that students -- soon to be grads -- need to be able to tell a good "story" about anything that is on their resume and that activities not related to engineering are both important (and useful on a resume) and can differentiate them from others.
The pdf is here: Challenges and opportunities for chemical engineers.
Showing posts with label careers for chemical engineers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label careers for chemical engineers. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Chemical Engineering as a career
This post gives a short synopsis of the slide show for the summer engineering program at Notre Dame for 6/23/10. Here is a pdf of the slides that are posted on one of my webpages .
The slide show describes a little about the traditional chemical industries with the example of fluidized catalytic cracking, which is used to increase the gasoline and diesel fuel yield from crude oil. Wikipedia has an excellent article on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking).
I talked about Arrhenius kinetics and showed the equation. The slideshow on this topic is available here. It is actually one of my favorite lectures that I have ever given as you can see why the rule of thumb of doubling of a reaction rate with a 10 C rise in temperature has to be the case for reactions that occur on time scales that are useful for industrial processes and why if you want to run a profitable chemical process, you need a catalyst that gets the activation energy down in the range of 25 kcal/mole.
For the kinetics part of the talk I used lightsticks to show the effect of temperature. One was at room temperature and one was cooled with ice (with added salt). There was a noticeable difference in brightness, which lasted only a few minutes. A question that could be asked, that I did not answer in class, is if we would expect the temperatures to equalize on this time scale. This is easily checked using the principles of Transport Phenomena, specifically transient heat conduction. The governing equation for a cylinder heating up would be the "heat equation", which is a parabolic partial differential equation. For the estimation that we want, there is no need to solve the equation, but to note that if the thermal diffusivity for the liquid in the lightstick is about 10^-7 m^2/s (the value for water), then the time scale for relaxation of the temperature would be the radius of the lightstick (or actually the tube inside of it) squared, divided by the this value of thermal diffusivity. If the radius of this inner tube is about .5 cm. (.005 cm), then the time scale is 250s or about 4 minutes. This matches extremely well!
The soda pop demonstration showed the the fizzing of a shaken bottle occurs because the gas that is present in the bottle is broken into lots of little bubbles than all can grow. Because it is difficult to spontaneously create bubbles in a liquid, just opening the cap, without shaking, does not allow a lot of transfer of CO2 from the liquid to the gas. The process of creating a new phase, within another phase is called nucleation. Homogeneous nucleation usually require considerable superheat or supersaturation. You can observe bubble nucleation when boiling water on a stovetop. Note that before boiling occurs, bubbles form on the bottom of the pan in scratches and other places where air has been trapped when the water was added. This process of bubble formation is heterogeneous nucleation.
The lecture proceeded to talk about roles for chemical engineers in renewable energy (new materials and material processing for solar and wind) and other topics.
The last part of the class presentation addressed the role of chemical engineers in medicine. Topics discussed were tissue engineering (the video was from Scientific American Frontiers about a decade ago) and new drug delivery devices and constructs.
There is much additional information in the slide show about the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum and careers for chemical engineers.
The slide show describes a little about the traditional chemical industries with the example of fluidized catalytic cracking, which is used to increase the gasoline and diesel fuel yield from crude oil. Wikipedia has an excellent article on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking).
I talked about Arrhenius kinetics and showed the equation. The slideshow on this topic is available here. It is actually one of my favorite lectures that I have ever given as you can see why the rule of thumb of doubling of a reaction rate with a 10 C rise in temperature has to be the case for reactions that occur on time scales that are useful for industrial processes and why if you want to run a profitable chemical process, you need a catalyst that gets the activation energy down in the range of 25 kcal/mole.
For the kinetics part of the talk I used lightsticks to show the effect of temperature. One was at room temperature and one was cooled with ice (with added salt). There was a noticeable difference in brightness, which lasted only a few minutes. A question that could be asked, that I did not answer in class, is if we would expect the temperatures to equalize on this time scale. This is easily checked using the principles of Transport Phenomena, specifically transient heat conduction. The governing equation for a cylinder heating up would be the "heat equation", which is a parabolic partial differential equation. For the estimation that we want, there is no need to solve the equation, but to note that if the thermal diffusivity for the liquid in the lightstick is about 10^-7 m^2/s (the value for water), then the time scale for relaxation of the temperature would be the radius of the lightstick (or actually the tube inside of it) squared, divided by the this value of thermal diffusivity. If the radius of this inner tube is about .5 cm. (.005 cm), then the time scale is 250s or about 4 minutes. This matches extremely well!
The soda pop demonstration showed the the fizzing of a shaken bottle occurs because the gas that is present in the bottle is broken into lots of little bubbles than all can grow. Because it is difficult to spontaneously create bubbles in a liquid, just opening the cap, without shaking, does not allow a lot of transfer of CO2 from the liquid to the gas. The process of creating a new phase, within another phase is called nucleation. Homogeneous nucleation usually require considerable superheat or supersaturation. You can observe bubble nucleation when boiling water on a stovetop. Note that before boiling occurs, bubbles form on the bottom of the pan in scratches and other places where air has been trapped when the water was added. This process of bubble formation is heterogeneous nucleation.
The lecture proceeded to talk about roles for chemical engineers in renewable energy (new materials and material processing for solar and wind) and other topics.
The last part of the class presentation addressed the role of chemical engineers in medicine. Topics discussed were tissue engineering (the video was from Scientific American Frontiers about a decade ago) and new drug delivery devices and constructs.
There is much additional information in the slide show about the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum and careers for chemical engineers.
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