Chemical engineers educated in the undergraduate programs of departments of chemical engineering have received an education that has been proven highly effective. Chemical engineering educational programs have accomplished this by managing to teach a methodology for solving a wide range of problems. They first did so by using case studies from the chemical process industries. They began case studies in the early part of the 20th century by considering the complete processes for the manufacture of certain chemicals and how they were designed, operated, and controlled. This approach was made much more effective when it was recognized that all chemical processes contained elements that had the same characteristics, and the education was then organized around various unit operations. Great progress was made during the 1940s and 1950s in experimental studies that quantified the analysis and design of heat exchangers and equilibrium stage operations such as distillation. The 1960s saw the introduction of reaction and reactor analysis into the curriculum, which emphasized the critical relationship between experiment and mathematical modeling and use of the verified models for practical design. We have built upon this approach, coupled with the tools of transport phenomena, to develop this text.

Our approach to teaching mass and heat transfer has the following goals:

1. Teach students a methodology for rational, engineering analysis of problems in mass and heat transport, i.e., to develop model equations to describe mass and heat transfer based on the relationship between experimental data and model.

2. Using these model equations, teach students to design and interpret laboratory experiments in mass and heat transfer and then to effectively translate this knowledge to the operation and design of mass and heat transfer equipment.

3. […]