Course Description:

How can you estimate the release of pollutants from a coal-fired power plant and how changes to processes within the plant might influence the amount released to the environment? If a bench-scale drug compound is showing promising results, how do you start to think about producing enough to treat millions of people? Chemical engineers are challenged with similar questions across a wide variety of fields and applications including petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, polymers, consumer products, water purification, food science, and commodity and specialty chemicals. In designing the processes to support these various needs, chemical engineers need to consider the operations involved, the amounts of raw materials that are required, separations of more and less valuable materials, and energy requirements.

In this course you will be introduced to how to start to evaluate and estimate the necessary components of a chemical process as chemical engineers. The decisions related to chemical processes can have profound economic, environmental, and even political consequences.