Application Of Chemical Engineering Principles Research Articles

A new food engineering elective course for chemical engineering students

A degree in chemical engineering offers a variety of career paths, including petrochemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, and food industries. However, chemical engineering students are rarely exposed to the application of chemical engineering principles to food processes. By providing the opportunity for students to acquire a deeper knowledge and the skill sets on the food industry, would possibly make them more comfortable in choosing the food and beverage sector as a career. This paper describes the development of a new food engineering class offered as elective for chemical engineering students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The course was developed based on backwards design where its principles and course structure are described followed by a discussion. Since the course was offered during Spring 2020, the initial design and assessments had to be slightly modified in order to accommodate remote teaching and such modifications are presented. The manuscript also presents suggestions on how to implement a minor in food engineering for chemical engineering students and educational research perspectives.

Who Would Have Thought? The Story of a Food Engineer.

Food engineering is a hybrid of food science and an engineering science, like chemical engineering in my particular case, resulting in the application of chemical engineering principles to food systems and their constituents. With the complexity of food and food processing, one generally narrows his or her interests, and my primary interests were in the kinetics of reactions important in foods, thermal processing, deposition of unwanted materials from food onto heated surfaces (fouling), and microwave heat transfer in baking. This review describes how I developed an interest in these topics and the contributions I have hopefully made to understanding food and to the application of engineering.

From Chemical Engineering to Ceramic Technology: A Review of Research at the Instituto de Tecnología Cerámica

The present paper provides an overview of the research conducted at the Instituto de Tecnologia Ceramica (ITC). ITC research focuses on the application of Chemical Engineering principles to the study of raw materials, unit operations involved ceramic materials manufacturing processes, chemical reactions occurring in the course of the manufacturing processes, finished product properties, and other aspects of ceramic manufacturing processes related to the field of Chemical Engineering.

An Indoor Air Quality Model That Includes the Sorption of VOCs on Fabrics

The Indoor Air Quality model developed in this study involves the application of chemical engineering principles to the movement and potential control of volatile substances in buildings. The model incorporates the surface interactions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) with interior materials. Sorption parameters estimated in a test chamber are then applied to an actual test house in Kuwait as an example building. Model parameters including source emission rates, removal rates by adsorption and surface emission rates by desorption, together with their relationships with air movement in the chamber, have been studied. Adsorption and desorption rate constants for four VOCs have been obtained using polyacrylonitrile, polyester and cotton textiles that are usually present in living room carpets, sofas and curtains of actual houses. The adsorption isotherms obtained by thermogravimetric analysis reveal that Henry's law can be used as an approximate isotherm for VOC concentrations in air below 1000 mg−3. The linear adsorption rate constants (based on bare fibre areas) for the tested fibre materials ranged from 0.02 to 7.3 mh−1 and the linear desorption rate constants ranged from 0.001 to 17.8 h−1. The model developed in this study predicts concentration profiles that fit very well with the concentrations measured in an actual test house located in Kuwait, providing good prediction of ways of improving air quality inside buildings in all locations.

Computer aided application of chemical engineering principles in the development of coatings

This paper is to provide chemical engineers with a perspective of the opportunities and the challenges in the development of computer-aided-tools for the coatings industry which has annual world-wide sales of about forty billion U.S. dollars. Key ingredients of typical coating systems are polymers, pigments, solvents and miscellaneous additives. A coating chemist/engineer must balance a large number of end use properties by manipulating the types and amounts of the ingredients when developing an optimum formulation. To be effective, an in-depth understanding of the interactions of the ingredients is essential. Many of these interactions can be estimated by the application of chemical engineering principles. Unfortunately, due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the development work, it is unrealistic to expect a coating chemist/engineer to apply the variety of these principles quantitatively. However, with the use of computers, user friendly packages can be developed and utilized by these technical people. We will review computer-aided application of these principles in the research and development of coatings, using successful applications in our own laboratory as examples, such as polymer design, polymerization process development, and solvent formulation. Based on our own experience, benefits and limitations of this approach will be presented.