Companion in Chemical Engineering: An Instructional Supplement, BnW Second Edition

The black-and-white document "Companion in Chemical Engineering (CinChE)" is designed to aid students in the development of their critical thinking skills as engineering problem solvers. The creative problem-solving methodology emphasized in CinChE provides a general framework in which to solve any type of well-defined engineering problem involving material balances, phase equilibria, and energy balances. It is a systems strategy that heavily uses the mental processes of decomposition, chunking, and pattern matching, and it is specifically designed to enhance students' higher-order thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The CinChE methodology is more systematic than the problem-solving strategies found in most textbooks for the introductory course on chemical engineering. Many of the example problems presented in the CinChE manual are similar to ones found in the Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes textbook (Felder, Rousseau, and Bullard, 2016), but their solutions are based on the problem-solving methodology emphasized in the CinChE manual.

Because the CinChE manuscript was compiled using Adobe Acrobat(R), it contains many popup notes and web links. Using a supplied web address and Acrobat Reader(R), students can electronically view the popup notes and access the web links that appear in many of the graphic organizers and example problems of the paper copy. The popup notes provide valuable information to help clarify the content within a graphic organizer or an example problem. The web links access text files, Excel(R) files, Aspen HYSYS(R) files, and Acrobat PDF(R) files. Students can download and view the electronic version of the CinChE manual but cannot copy or print its contents.

An Excel Add-In called "EZ Setup" that works on Windows-based and Apple-based computers is provided with the second edition. This VBA Add-In macro is used extensively throughout the second edition to solve many exercises and problems. The purpose of the "EZ Setup" utility is to transform a textual description of a set of algebraic equations into an Excel Data/Solver formulation, allowing the user to execute the Data/Solver command to find possibly a numerical solution to the algebraic equations by minimizing the sum of squares. A textual description is a mathematical model or a mathematical algorithm that represents the solution for an exercise or a problem.