Computers

&Chemical
ELSEVIER Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966
Engineering
www.elsevier.com/locate/compchemeng

Product design
Arthur W. Westerberg *, Eswaran Subrahmanian
Department of Chemical Engineering, Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Abstract

We respond to a request to examine the area of product design and its impact on chemical engineering. We focus on how we
are educating our undergraduates and deliberately adopt a controversial stand. Examples of products requiring chemical
engineering concepts are new drugs, a new tape that one can remove without peeling off paint, computer chips and an
oxygen-enriching device. We find more of our students involved in product design, both in the traditional chemical industry,
where the move to high value added chemicals is occurring, and in start-up companies. There are teaching materials on product
design from other disciplines, and Cussler and Moggridge have an upcoming text on chemical product design. Product design
requires we spend considerable effort in defining what is to be designed and how we shall measure success of the design, activities
we as a discipline de-emphasize in our current process design course. We find a need for very diverse views when designing
products, often requiring we team up with people having backgrounds in such fields as fine arts, business, social sciences and other
engineering disciplines. A more detailed look at product design activities allows us to point at some of the tools that are useful
for this activity. One of our suggestions is that product design may be a better capstone activity as it brings together the students'
entire educational experiences and not just their chemical engineering educational experiences. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All
rights reserved.

Keywords: Product design; Controversial stand; Traditional chemical industry

1. Introduction that chemical engineers would have a distinct advan-

tage in designing. We then make a case for why product
For that past few years, we have been involved in design is important for our discipline and should not be
teaching general engineering design courses at Carnegie ignored. We can easily note that industry has to be and
Mellon. The latest a m o n g these courses is one that is very actively looking at chemical product design. We
invites any students on campus in their junior or later next extract the general characteristics of product de-
year to participate in the design of engineered products. sign that distinguishes it from process design. We hope
We suspect it is for this reason, we were invited to to make evident areas for research and teaching by
prepare this paper. making this comparison.
Our goal for this paper is to look at the opportunities Other engineering disciplines have for some time
for chemical engineers in the product design area, with emphasized product design, and we find in their text-
the intended outcome to influence much more interest books guidelines for a design process for products (e.g.
in this area in our teaching. The interest is already Pugh, 1990). We outline such a process based on these
rampant in the industry. Few, if any, chemical engi- books, along with approaches we have also developed
neering curricula and research efforts concern them- while teaching our interdisciplinary engineering design
selves explicitly with product design. Most of us in the courses. We draw specifically from the aforementioned
process systems area concentrate on process (rather product design course and on another we have taught
than product) design and operation. on design problem formulation for the last decade.
We start this paper with m a n y examples of products We point out m a n y of the tools we now use in
process operation that would help in the design of
products. Finally we offer suggestions for changes to
the chemical engineering curriculum to make product
* Corresponding author. design a more serious part of it.

0098-1354/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0098-13 54(00)00400-2
960 A.W. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian / Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966

2. Examples of product design neering product design course we just mentioned above.
We have found this book to be particularly useful in
Everything is a product but some things are more so. teaching students a number of simple but very useful
In universities, we generally teach chemical process tools to use to attack product design problems. We
(rather than product) design. In process design, the have also used the previous edition of the text by Ulrich
product the students create is the design, while the and Eppinger (2000) in this same course. Finally we
ultimate product is the designed plant. Our teaching have found web pages indicating that Cussler and
emphasis is on supporting the generation and analysis Moggridge (1999) are well along in preparing a text on
of process alternatives for the manufacturing of com- chemical product design. It appears this last book will
modity chemicals. We typically ask the students to be specifically for the design of chemically related
discover the most economic process they can devise. products.
Thus we also present to our students the primary goal
for their designs: minimum cost and/or maximum
profit.
Our goal in this paper is another type of product in 4. Why chemical product design?
which chemical engineers should have a distinct advan-
tage when designing. Examples of these types of prod- In a conference paper posted on the web, Cussler and
ucts are: Moggridge (1999) make a very strong case that we
• a portable device to deliver enriched oxygen to am- should become interested in chemical product design.
bulatory heart patients They state that over half of the BS chemical engineers
• a tape that sticks to a painted surface for a year and are now entering product-oriented companies, a large
then can be removed without pulling off the paint increase over the past. We have witnessed a similar shift
• a drug to combat Parkinson's disease at CMU.
• a nonfat replacement for cooking oil when frying A second argument is that our traditional oil and
food chemical companies are undergoing major changes. To-
• a fuel for race cars day, anyone anywhere can manufacture a commodity
• a disposable diaper chemical. If a major company or a country makes it a
• a hand warmer for cold winter football games or for policy to manufacture styrene, it can buy a turnkey
use on the ski slopes manufacturing plant and, without too much effort, be
in business. When one can purchase process technology
You can see the contrast with process design by for commodities so easily, the only advantage a com-
considering the following problems, which are much pany can have in the long run is to produce the
more typical of what we use as examples when teaching commodity cheaper and/or better, hopefully in a man-
our current chemical engineering design courses: ner recently protected by patents. To be cheaper sug-
• a plant to deliver 1000 tonnes/day of ammonia gests optimizing operations and/or finding improved
• a manufacturing facility to produce 30% of the cur- routes that use less expensive raw materials and/or less
rent demand for vitamin C fuel. To concentrate on and optimize what a company
• a process to produce the above new fuel for race produces best is the adopted business strategy. Opti-
cars, once what it is has been determined mization technology is also readily available so it alone
allows a company only to keep up with what others are
We find today that chemists are much more in the doing. Interestingly, such things as being close to the
front line of discovering new specialty chemicals. raw materials will win if the final products are cheap to
Chemical engineers tend to take over when someone ship relative to the raw materials. Of course, very large
wants such a new chemical manufactured. We would tankers and pipelines change the economics of trans-
like to argue here that chemical engineers can and porting commodities and their raw materials.
should move earlier and into the product design activ- We have all witnessed a shift by several chemical
ity, even for specialty chemicals. companies to high value added chemical manufacture.
We can see a move to producing such things as spe-
cialty chemicals, perhaps as biotech chemicals and
3. Some key references pharmaceuticals. However, these are the products of
which we are speaking, so these companies are already
There are three primary references we have used for in the product design business.
this paper. The first is the textbook by Dym and Little We should note that some firms - - notably 3M and
(2000). The authors produced this book specifically to Kodak - - have seemingly always directed a consider-
support student team-based product design activities. able part of their attention to the design and manufac-
We are currently using it in the multidisciplinary engi- ture of chemical products.
 A. IV. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian/ Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966 961

A last observation is that the US at this time is a deciding what the product is to be. One would be
hotbed for new start-up companies. Start-up companies robbing the students of the excitement of designing a
are almost always in the product business and not the product if one were to tell them all the functionality it
commodity business. If we want our chemical engineer- should have, suggest to them how they might create the
ing students to participate in this exciting activity, they product to get that functionality, and then tell them
too should learn about product design. how they should judge it to be a successful product.
In product design, one typically starts with a word
description that outlines what might - - and we stress
5. Process versus product design might - - be wanted. An example already given earlier
is to invent a tape that sticks to a painted surface for a
We do teach design in our traditional curriculum. We year and then can be removed without pulling off the
need to examine how product design differs from what paint. Design specifications are for new product func-
we now cover in our traditional capstone process design tionality; they are not just purity specs for given
course. In this section, we shall contrast process and molecules.
product design. A goal in product design is to meet customer needs
- - often referred to as the 'voice of the customer.'
5. I. Characteristics of process design Students have to establish what the product should do,
they also have to decide how to invent alternative
The design effort in process design is to design a products capable of delivering this need, and they have
process to manufacture what is often a commodity to decide how to evaluate the worth of what they have
chemical, such as vinyl chloride, ammonia or styrene, invented. They could easily be involved in developing a
or we may dealkylate toluene. We typically tell the business plan for their product as a part of establishing
students what we want to be made and how much we its worth.
want of it per year. We also ask them to discover a Products are different from chemical processes in the
minimum cost or maximum profit process, i.e. we tell following key ways. A product typically has a short life
them the primary goal is economics. Of course we also measured in months, compared to perhaps 1 or 2 years.
tell them to consider safety, environmental impact (for Only if it can be protected by a fairly all encompassing
example, as constraints on producing wastes), and per- patent and a long development process - - such as a
haps control. The approach is to ask the students to pharmaceutical - - a company can hope it will last
invent a process built of unit operations to arrive at much longer.
their design. The company that brings a really new product to the
The stress in this activity is on large-scale manufac- market has a distinct advantage by being first. Thus the
ture. The lifetime of the process designed is often design effort may stress getting the product out the
measured in decades. The processes are typically con- door over creating the most economic solution. One
tinuous ones. hears numbers that suggest being first, leads to captur-
This course is excellent in making the students use all ing and often holding onto 70% of the market.
that they have learned in their previous courses on
thermodynamics, transport, unit operations and kinet-
ics. It is a great unifier of concepts for them, imparting 6. Product design is a mix of many talents
a deeper appreciation of the technical chemical engi-
neering subjects they have learned. It is, in short, an Chemical product design is a mixture of many tal-
invaluable synthesis of technical concepts they have ents, including those from business, fine arts, social
previously studied. science, other engineering, as well as chemistry and
Students start often by looking for existing processes chemical engineering.
described in the literature. These they use to develop a
base case. We ask them to invent alternatives for their 6.1. Business
separation process, to heat integrate everything, and so
forth. The analysis involves carrying out heat and Even for commodity chemical manufacturing, busi-
material balances, leading finally to a simple economic ness issues prove to be extremely important. Unfortu-
analysis based typically on estimating the prices for nately, we seldom convey this message to our students.
equipment, utilities, raw materials and products. For example, an oil company will make or lose much
more on the purchase of the right tanker of crude oil
5.2. Character&tics of product design than it ever will by optimizing the running of a refinery
(see Davis, Subrahmanian and Westerberg (1999) for a
Product design is different. Perhaps the most impor- discussion of this problem). Technology will exist in a
tant difference is that a key step in product design is few years that will support making this decision much
962 A.W. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian/ Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966

better than we can do today. For example, to decide dominant position. These decisions directly affect the
which to buy, if any, of the tankers of crude that are profits that we would use to make our decisions when
available, one would like to know the following kinds optimizing economic benefits.
of information:
• the amount and composition of the crude in the 6.2. Fine arts
tanker (this one is not easy)
• the amount and compositions for all crude and Products have to appeal to consumers. The look and
products currently in the company's inventory feel of the interface one creates for the product often is
• in which tanks at which sites are all those crudes and the key issue for this appeal. We are risking a lot when
products we design technical programs, including the user inter-
• the predicted prices at which they can sell the prod- face, without using the services of people who know
ucts vs. time which colors and shapes suggest technical competence,
• the possible production capacities for all facilities for and so forth. Non-intuitive interfaces can be a night-
all products mare for users. Non-reassuring interfaces can give users
• where geographically are the customers for the a lack of confidence in the tools.
products In our course on product design at CMU, one group
designed a laser tape measure. Fine arts design depart-
The enormous optimization problem you probably ment students spent their entire time designing the
see forming here would then be something like search- color, what sorts of buttons to have, the functionality
ing for that combination of purchases that maximizes of the buttons, etc. They did this while the electrical
the probable present worth of the company, subject to engineers designed the analog chip and circuit board
accounting in some fashion for the risks involved. To needed inside to do the measurements and to respond
our knowledge, no one can do this calculation yet. to the interface. The difference in customer appeal of
Today much of the buying is based on very intelligent their first and their final design was enormous. Few
intuition and rough heuristics. people would have bought the first; the last was very
Businesses today are analyzing their supply and value attractive, intuitive and just looked like it was a durable
chains. They are looking both upstream and down- and technically superior product.
stream of their own manufacturing to see if they can Another project we had was to design what became a
reduce costs overall. They may ask cooperating suppli- web-based teaching module to learn about industrial
ers to meet much more stringent standards. They may processes for air separation. The goal was a module
also evaluate the advantages of consolidating steps that would appeal to both high school students and
along the chain. These business decisions are very im- bachelor level chemical engineers. Fine arts students
portant to the well being of the company. helped their chemical engineering team members to
Another example of where business decisions signifi- develop the look and feel of the presentation, worrying
cantly impact company profits is as follows. Suppose about the impact of color, organization of the pages,
Company A manufactures a high quality monomer at a strategic use of animation, and so forth. As we intro-
low cost that it knows others are unlikely to match. duce computer tools into the workplace, issues of infor-
However, others may manufacture an inferior mation design, presentation, style and aesthetics
monomer at similar costs by simply purchasing existing become an integral part of their design.
off-the-shelf technology. The company has to decide
whether to sell at higher prices and allow others to get 6.3. Social sciences
into the market or sell at prices that make the inferior
monomer not worth the price needed by the other Fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, lin-
companies to make a profit. These decisions are likely guistics and history of technology provide a rich set of
much more important than all sorts of optimization of methods to enhance the understanding and execution of
processes. However, once made, then optimization of- product design. These fields provide methods that con-
fers added profits. tribute to identifying customer needs, for qualitative
For product design in start-up companies, business methods for decision making and for evaluation of the
decisions are extremely important. Venture capitalists design process through such instruments as question-
will generally not support a company that does not naires, interviews, focus studies and historical analysis.
have a good and believable business plan, laying out its We should see social sciences as our partner in creating
strategy to make money, ultimately. These business engineers who understand consequences and effects of
decisions often dictate survival, not just profit. such social processes on decision making and priority
Such decisions can include among other things, the setting.
decision that the company will sell low, build up market Social science can also play a significant role in
share, and then increase prices only after it has a helping create a product design environment to support
 A.W. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian/ Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966 963

collaborating teams having members with diverse back- products.

grounds. As engineers, we should welcome this inter- • They have a lifetime measured in months (before a
face to adapt the methods of social sciences for product better competitive product appears).
and design process design. • Small volume and high value suggests one will often
use an existing multipurpose batch plant for spe-
6.4. Excellent chemical and chemical eng&eering cialty chemicals, a general purpose billion dollar
technology fabrication plant for chips, or an existing manufac-
turing line for physical products. Design of the man-
Finally, for chemical product design, there is no ufacturing process is often, therefore, a retrofit
escaping the need for superior science and technology. design or the design of how to operate an existing
For example, discovering a mixture of components that process differently.
will glow when put into high shear can make or break • If one is designing the manufacturing process - -
a product. Or finding ways to deliver a drug over 5 h that is, what is often the process design part of the
when ingested is required technology for many design activity, one is carrying out an activity that is
products. often more like designing a kitchen. Based on the
range of recipes produced in the past, one knows one
6.5. Therefore, product design is a mix of talents wants a few pots of this size, a few more of that and
so forth.
One generally does not do product design as we are • Chemical products are often solids. Strangely, we in
discussing it here with a team comprising of only academia in the US do not emphasize the handling
chemical engineers. A valid experience requires much of solids.
more than the technology to be considered to make a
successful product. In our course, one of the electrical
engineering students understood this point only at the
end of the course when he stated that he could be the
8. The product design process
best circuit designer in the whole world, but, if he
produced products no on wanted to buy, he would be a
We shall outline here the steps involved in product
failure.
design. Dym and Little illustrate these steps in figure
2.3 on p. 31 of their text (Dym & Little, 2000). This
material as we present it here, is also based on ideas in
7. A list of the characteristics of chemical products
Ulrich and Eppinger (2000) and on our own experi-
ences in teaching our engineering product design
We summarize here many of the characteristics we
courses.
see for chemical products. The characteristics suggest
issues we must then consider when designing them.
8.1. Client statement (word statement of need)
7.1. Classes of products
The first activity is to discover the goals for the
We see at least the following three classes of products design - - i.e. what it must deliver for all the stakehold-
as being ones for which chemical engineering talents ers involved to be happy about it. Stakeholders include
would prove useful. the designers, the manufacturers, the distributors and
I. Products which are chemicals such as pharmaceuti- the customers. An example of a customer need for the
cals, proteins, insecticides, cleaning fluids, tape above is that it must stick to paint and it must
lubricants; come off a year later without stripping off the paint. If
2. products that require chemistry to manufacture we were manufacturing it, we would also want it to be
them such as computer chips and layered manufac- easy to manufacture and safe. Persons who sell it to the
turing products; and customer may also want it to be available in a familiar
3. physical devices that involve chemistry in their de- form. Dym and Little suggest the construction of an
livered functionality, such as a portable oxygen object tree that organizes the desired objectives in a
generator and lens that change color in the sunlight. hierarchy, where we may, for example, put safety as a
top node. Under safety we might say we want it to be
harmless if touched, possibly ingestible and so forth.
7.2. General characteristics In our problem formulation course, we called this
first step, the establishing of the goals for the design.
We break goals into objectives and constraints, noting
• As noted earlier, they tend to be high value added that the same goal could be either, depending on the
964 A. IV. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian / Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966

effort we may be willing to expend to meet it. For This understanding helps to reduce the number of
example, we could say we want the product to have a options we have to examine by establishing just where
minimum manufacturing cost or we could simply state in the space of outcomes that we are really interested.
we want it to cost no more than $0.25 to manufacture
it per 10 m of length. The former implies more work to 8.5. Develop tests
discover the better design.
Products always have many objectives they must In our course on problem formulation, we emphasize
meet. By making them concentrate on establishing their the creation of tests that allow one to pick a design
goals, of which they usually generate a dozen, students alternative and assess for it how well it does in meeting
quickly realize that product design must be a tradeoff the stated goals. For example, we need to state clearly
activity. To this end, our formulation course discusses how we intend to assess the manufacturing cost. If a
pareto optimization concepts. pill is to dispense a medicine over 8 h when ingested,
Another difficulty with goals is that in the early how do we predict that the designed pill meets that
stages most of them are very subjective. goal. Are we going to model it, prototype it, ask a
Dym and Little discuss different strategies to elicit panel of experts, or what? If we prototype it, how many
the needs of all the shareholders, including brainstorm- tests will we run and under what conditions? Will
ing and questionnaires. humans be involved? Tests can often be very time
A next step once one has a number of goals listed, is consuming and often felt to be not worth the effort.
to decide the relative importance of each. Dym and Students have to make that decision also. For example,
Little propose using a weighting scheme applied to the mechanical engineers shudder when someone suggests
objective tree. creating a finite element model for a part they cannot
model in their favorite FEM program. For this case
8.2. Managing the design process they would often rather build a physical prototype and
test it.
Dym and Little outline some useful management
tools that can help organize student projects. The first 8. 6. And so forth
is a 'work breakdown structure,' which organizes the
tasks the students decide they will need to develop a There are many more steps that we shall not describe
design that meets all their goals. One can use a 'linear at length. These include establishing the space in which
responsibility chart' to assign these tasks to individuals. one is willing to look for design alternatives, generating
Assignments may be as primary responsibility, consul- and evaluating alternatives, etc. One must also decide
tant, and so forth. Microsoft's Project allows the devel- which parts we shall purchase and which we shall
opment of activity networks that partially order the manufacture in-house. The team has to decide how to
tasks, calendars and Gantt charts. assemble the final product. It must also think seriously
about distributing, servicing, and ultimately disposing
8.3. Establishing design function of the product.
By this time, you should have the idea that product
This step is hard. One has to convert the previously design is fascinating and complex. Hopefully you can
defined objectives into an appreciation of all functions see that design teams that have diverse backgrounds
the product must deliver. These are often in the form of involved in them are generally needed.
an action verb and a noun. For example, a tape must
deliver physical strength (it cannot itself disintegrate as
one is sticking it on the wall). It must deliver holding 9. Ties to current chemical engineering process design
power (e.g. stick solidly enough that it can hold a technology
picture onto a wall), and so forth. Dym and Little
suggest a host of tools for this activity also. One can make a case to tie almost all the research
chemical engineers are now doing to the design of
8.4. Estimate desired levels of performance products. For example, research on tribology asks
about how surfaces are lubricated. This science is at the
One should look at each goal and establish the limits heart of the design of the reading heads for disk
that one expects for it. For example, suppose one is memories. So also are computational fluid calculations
trying to design a product that is similar to that of a that permit the modeling of how these heads fly above
competitor but is cheaper to manufacture. We should the disk. Here we shall point at a select few that are in
assess how big a savings we want. We might be barely our current process systems engineering methodologies
interested in a savings of $1/unit. Any savings beyond and are directly relevant. From these examples, one can
$5/unit would guarantee we are interested ($5/unit). readily see many more.
 A.W. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian / Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966 965

9.1. Searching f o r chemicals with desired functionality and the expansion of batch processes are central to this
- - an inverse problem activity. These technologies often involve the setting up
and solving of mixed integer nonlinear programs, many
There is an interesting inverse problem in chemistry of which are the themes of papers at this conference.
that relates directly to product design. Today we are See extensive work by the research groups of Gross-
more and more skilled at using first principles to com- mann at Carnegie Mellon, Sargent and Pantelides at
pute the properties of a given molecule. We migrate up Imperial College and Reklaitis and Pekny at Purdue for
from quantum mechanical calculations ultimately to the examples.
estimation of mixture properties, using the more de- Since we will typically reuse equipment, retrofitting it
tailed computations at each step to give us experiments for new products is a significant part of the design
we can use to fix parameters at the less detailed levels. activities for products. This problem is combinatorially
The inverse problem we need to solve for the design of extremely difficult. We really should dedicate more
a specialty chemical is to select the properties and find activity in PSE to this problem and directly relate our
the molecule or mixture of molecules that give us those efforts to product design.
properties. Papers in the PSE area, for example by The manufacture of pharmaceuticals offers a very
Stephanopoulos and Venkatasubramanian and their re- interesting engineering problem. The FDA approves
search students, have discussed the use of group contri- both a drug and the exact process by which one manu-
bution methods to find combinations of groups to give factures it. This approval takes years and is very costly.
a prescribed behavior. Given the groups, one then In this case, design is directed at not changing anything
attempts to construct molecules having them. about the manufacture that could be interpreted as
In chemical product design, one recent development changing the manufacturing process. Scale-up is often
that is going to have a significant impact is combinato- the creating of parallel identical processes rather than
rial chemistry. With our ability rapidly improving in the creating a larger single process. It seems evident also
area of fabricating chemical processes on a chip that design of the process must go hand-in-hand with
through the use of micro- and nano-technology manu- the design of the first process by which one produces
facturing techniques, we can imagine using mass screen- enough for testing. It cannot really come later.
ing techniques to discover chemical products with
desired properties. This screening is Edisonian, but,
when one can do 100 000 experiments in a day instead
of perhaps 5000 in a week, it become a viable screening 10. In closing, some recommendations
approach. Quiram, Jensen, Schmidt, Massachusetts,
Mills, Ryley et al. (1999) presented a nice review paper A main goal for this article is to make us think
on doing chemistry on a chip last year at FOCAPD99 seriously about specifically redirecting our efforts in
in neighboring Breckenridge. chemical engineering toward the design of products for
which our background is important. The move by
9.2. Ties to process design and operation methodologies many chemical companies to high value added products
and by many start-up companies to product design in
Many of the tools we have developed for the design the US would seem to dictate this redirection. These are
and operation of chemical processes are very useful for the employers of more and more of our students. Since
product design. For example, we can and are extending much of what we do is already directly relevant, redi-
the process simulators that we use for commodity rection may be simply making students aware of how
chemicals so they can handle specialty chemicals. There these courses impact product design. We also attempted
are now extensions to aid in the design of bio related here to make the case that we must sensitize our
processes. We also see simulators appearing for the students to the need for them to interact with others
design of batch processes (see work by Harmon Ray from business, fine arts, social sciences, and so forth.
and his group at Wisconsin and again by Stephanopou- This interaction is crucial to the success of product
los and his group at MIT). These are for the design of design activities in which they will almost certainly
products that are themselves chemicals. Electrical engi- participate.
neering is the origin for simulators for the design of Based on the discussion we have undertaken in this
chip fabrication processes. The very significant chemical paper, we offer the following recommendations:
and transport aspects of these simulators are where we • Continue with course material on the design of
are making chemical engineering contributions. chemical processes. However, this could be less than
We often elect to manufacture chemical products in the capstone design course currently is. It should
existing facilities. When the product requires the manu- include some experience on the design of batch
facture of a chemical, we use chemical batch processes. chemical processes as well as on the design of large
All the techniques we have developed for scheduling commodity chemical processes.
966 A. IV. Westerberg, E. Subrahmanian / Computers and Chemical Engineering 24 (2000) 959-966

• Add a product design course in which there are • In thermodynamics, occasionally ask students to find
projects that require chemical engineering expertise chemicals that have prescribed properties.
but also the expertise of many other disciplines. This
course may be better labeled the capstone course as
it really brings together an appreciation of their References
entire educational experiences and not just their
chemical engineering educational experiences. Cussler, E. L., & Moggridge, G. (1999). An introduction to chemical
product design (access either of these WWW pages as they
• As a part of this last item, have students learn to contain the same material) http://www.aidic.it/CONGRESSI/
work on multidisciplinary teams. They should work icheap4/papersicheap4/paperhtm/moggridge.htm; http://
with students from business, fine arts, humanities, www.chang.cam.ac.uk/news/abstract 15april 1999.html.
and so forth. In product design these different view- Davis, J. G., Subrahmanian, E., & Westerberg, A. W. (1999).
SCOPE: a blackboard model-based decision support system for
points are essential. crude-oil trading. International Journal of Intelligent Systems in
Finance and Management, 8.
The following two recommendations are for adding a Dym, C. L., & Little, P. (2000). Engineering design: a project-based
better understanding of chemical engineering technolo- introduction. New York: Wiley.
Pugh, S. (1990). Total design: methods for successful product engineer-
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