Chemical Product and Process Design Education

This paper discusses approaches for providing chemical engineering students a contemporary experience in product and process design. Current trends and issues in chemical engineering education are reviewed, as well as the interaction between business decision-making and product and process design. Then, the Stage-Gate product development process is examined as utilized by product and process engineers and business decision-makers (BDMs). The overlap between the Stage-Gate process and a template introduced to teach the steps in product and process design is examined next. For product design, problems involving molecular structure design, batch process synthesis and simulation, and configured consumer product design are recommended for undergraduate instruction. These involve quantitative synthesis and analysis to generate and select from among alternatives.