Week 1

Overview of CP5065: Introduction to Chemical Product Design

The module Introduction to Chemical Product Design (ICPD for short) is aimed at giving students in the Diploma in Chemical Engineering an insight into the type of skills that we need to equip ourselves with, as well as prepare us for the demand of our future workplaces. This will be done so with the help of the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) framework, where we will conceive solutions to current problems, design creative solutions, and keep on building on and refining those ideas. For this module, we are currently at the Conceive and Design stages of the process. We are to, by the end of the module, design a chemical product.

So what is a chemical product?

A chemical product is defined as a product that is designed by/manufactured with the use of chemical engineering principles. The process in which chemical products are designed is called... chemical product design! (super self-explanatory :D) The chemical engineering principles that are applied include:

• Fluid flow - Rheology, energy and mass balance, flow regime (such as turbulent, transitional, and laminar flow)
• Heat transfer - Evaporation, condensation, drying, heating and cooling
• Mass transfer - Distillation, liquid-liquid extraction, leaching, membrane separation, filtration, gas absorption
• Mechanical processes such as blending, sieving and grinding
• Reaction engineering - Batch, continuous, process control and instrumentation
• Thermodynamics - Vapour-liquid equilibrium, chemical potential, refrigeration (Rankine cycle), production of power from steam (Carnot cycle)
• Other processes such as electrolysis, fermentation, lyophilisation, crystallisation

One or more of the above processes can be applied to or be applied by the product for it to be considered a chemical product. Chemical products may be classified into one of the following:

• Commodities - made in large quantities while being sold at the lowest possible price and made using reaction engineering and unit operations. Examples include aluminium foil, crops for harvest and petroleum products
• Chemical device - miniature processes that achieve a specific chemical transformation and does so in order to provide convenience.  
• Molecular products - products that possess a specific chemical structure that is found through research, such as pharmaceutical drugs
• Micro-structured products - Products with specific functions, such as thread for clothes, sunscreen and paint.

For this module, we will focus on designing a chemical device.

Tuckman's Five Stages of Team Formation

The work to be done for this module, including this blog, is done in teams, and for all of us, we will each go through a number of stages in being a team as postulated by Bruce Tuckman. The five stages are:

1. Forming - The team gets familiar with each other and establish ground rules, and most members treat each other as strangers.
2. Storming - Each of the members may share what they feel, however they still do not see themselves as part of a whole, but rather, still as individuals. It is at this stage that members might show signs of hostility and reluctance to do their work.
3. Norming - The members of the team slowly feel like they are included and realise that they can get work done if they accept each others' viewpoints.
4. Performing - An open and trusting atmosphere is established among team members and the hierarchy of team members is no longer important to them.
5. Adjourning - All things must come to an end. At this stage, each members' contributions are recognised and the team celebrates the effort and assesses how they are to move forward after the project.

The blog

This blog was made in order to document the whole learning process for this module. Proper documentation of the process is important and helps keep the team on track and focused as they move forward. Hence, we will need to regularly update this blog (i.e. every week) to document our process in designing a chemical device in order for us to stay on task and refer to it if we ever need to use anything we have previously learnt or done in class.

We think documentation is really important as it helps us to remember what we have learnt in class and helps us keep track of what we do. It is also useful as it would mean we would have to spend less time doing the same research in terms of writing the report as we would have already found some of the resources that we need. Lastly, it helps us save time as we do not need to do last-minute work as we would have done it as we were going along with the process during the lesson.