Process Intensification In the Undergraduate Chemical Engineering Curriculum

During the coming decades, chemical process industries must continue to improve process efficiencies and energy use to remain globally competitive. Fundamental research and industrial activities in process intensification have significantly expanded during the past ten years.  Process intensification encompasses a broad spectrum of activities concerned with identifying fundamental limitations in a chemical production route, and developing or combining processes to minimize resource utilization and optimize product quality.  Process intensification is essential to industrial competitiveness as it can enhance safety, increase operating efficiency, lower energy usage, reduce capital costs, reduce waste emissions and process hazards, or encompass several of these benefits simultaneously.  To address the educational needs of chemical engineering undergraduates in process intensification, four undergraduate courses were updated to include process intensification concepts:  Fluid Flow Operations, Heat Transfer Operations, Mass Transfer Operations, and Chemical Reactor Design.  Three modules were conceived for each course and all of the modules are in a final development or implementation/refinement stage.  This presentation will provide an overview of these process intensification modules, examples of implementing these modules into an existing undergraduate course/curriculum structure, and preliminary assessment data.