Molecular-, fluid- and field-dynamics simulation are becoming more mainstream tools for practicing process engineers; here, the academic community needs to pay close attention to "upskilling" demands from industry, where remote working/training emphasizes the need for sophisticated computational-engineering design tools with molecular…

Thermodynamics challenges teachers and learners. Its pervasiveness about nature, mathematical abstractness, nonnumerical relations, and complexity in applications can inhibit understanding and usage, especially by undergraduates. Perspectives are given about these obstacles, and some suggestions are made to enhance comprehension of the discipline.

Generating a problem that addresses multiple course learning objectives can be a challenging, but worthwhile exercise for a professor. These types of problems are particularly useful late in a course to help students tie together seemingly disparate concepts to solve an integrated problem that requires them to review concepts mastered throughout…

Many different versions of Problem-based Learning (PBL) are used today. To be consistent in evaluating the effectiveness of PBL, the focus in this paper is on what Howard Barrows called authentic PBL (aPBL). In aPBL students are empowered with the learning process; key distinguishing features are that the students teach each other the new…

A simplified model of an industrially relevant fluid-particle flow system is analyzed using linear stability theory. Instabilities of the uniform state of a fluidized bed are investigated in response to small flow perturbations. Students are expected to perform each step of the computational analysis, and physical insight into key mechanistic…

"Chemical Engineering Modeling" is a first-semester graduate course traditionally taught in a lecture format at Oklahoma State University. The course as taught by the author for the past seven years focuses on numerical and mathematical methods as necessary skills for incoming graduate students. Recent changes to the course have included Visual…

The question addressed here is how to integrate computational tools, namely interactive general-purpose platforms, in the teaching of process units. Mathematica has been selected as a complementary tool to teach distillation processes, with the main objective of leading students to achieve a better understanding of the physical phenomena involved…