This text is designed to teach you how to carry out quantitative analysis of physical phenomena important to chemical professionals. In the chemical engineering curriculum, this course is typically taught in the junior year. Students with adequate preparation in thermodynamics and reactor design should be successful at learning the material in this book. Students lacking a reactor design course, such as chemists and other professionals, will need to pay additional attention to the material in Chapter 2 and may need to carry out additional preparation by using the references contained in that chapter. This book uses the logic employed in the simple analysis of reacting systems for reactor design to develop the more complex analysis of mass and heat transfer systems.

Analysis is the process of developing a mathematical description (model) of a physical situation of interest, determining behavior of the model, comparing the behavior with data from experiment or other sources, and using the verified model for various practical purposes.

There are two parts in the analysis process that deserve special attention:

• developing the mathematical model, and

• comparing model behavior with data.

Our experience with teaching analysis for many years has shown that the model development step can be effectively taught by following well-developed logic. Just what constitutes agreement between model behavior and data is a much more complex matter and is part of the art of analysis.