We are confronted with the great challenge of incorporating product design concepts into a curriculum that already constrained by limits on total hours and total numbers of courses. While one approach would split product design and process design into separate tracks, a promising alternative involves wrapping both product and process design into a single capstone project. The latter treatment builds on common features of both scales of design, while emphasizing optimization opportunities built on the integrated, multiscale perspective.

Process design projects in reality include much more than the design of tubes and tanks. All processes offer improvement opportunities based on a knowledge of molecular morphologies (such as crystallization), the use of nanostructuring compounds (such as corrosion inhibitors), leveraging mesoscale structures (such as membranes), or employing advanced macroscale structures (such as structured packing). Each of these are examples of the opportunities presented in process design projects.

Through the analysis of separations processes, we demonstrate how we can use this understanding to seamlessly incorporate product design studies into existing curricula.