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Summary: Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition
Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education
Introduction to Chemical Engineering Computing
Bruce A. Finlayson
Rehnberg Professor of Chemical Engineering
University of Washington
Introduction
Chemical engineers need to learn to use computer programs in order to do their
assignments in school and be technically competent when they graduate. In the past, computer
proficiency was obtained hit or miss, with too many students in the `miss' category. An elective
course was established in the Department of Chemical Engineering and given in Winter quarter,
2003, 2004, and 2005, to give beginning juniors a broad introduction to computers. They had
already taken a computer science course their freshman year, so the new course concentrated on
chemical engineering applications. This paper describes the course and gives a quantitative
assessment of its impact in the Chemical Reactor Design class.
Course Description
The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington uses Excel,
Matlab, Simulink, AspenPlus, and FEMLAB. This paper describes a course introducing students
to these programs, except for Simulink that is introduced in Process Control. For each topic (see
Table I), a lecture hour outlined the method used to solve a class of problems and demonstrated
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