Online courses directory (2511)

This course serves as an introduction to the fundamental principles of separation operations for the recovery of products from biological processes, membrane filtration, chromatography, centrifugation, cell disruption, extraction, and process design.

This course was last taught during the regular school year in the Spring semester of 1999, but has been a part of the MIT Technology and Development Program (TDP) at the Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST), as well as at MIT's Professional Institute in more recent years.

Experiments in this class are broadly aimed at acquainting students with the range of properties of polymers, methods of synthesis, and physical chemistry. Some examples of laboratory work include solution polymerization of acrylamide, bead polymerization of divinylbenzene, and interfacial polymerization of nylon 6,10. Evaluation of networks by tensile and swelling experiments, rheology of polymer solutions and suspensions, and physical properties of natural and silicone rubber are also covered.

This course uses reaction kinetics, batch reactor analysis, batch distillation, batch operations scheduling, safety analysis, and the ABACUSS process simulator to introduce process design and analysis techniques.

Acknowledgements

The materials for the Fall 2006 offering of this course were drawn extensively from the materials that Professor Paul Barton used while teaching this course in past years. We are indebted to him for his long service to 10.490.

This course introduces students to methods and background needed for the conceptual design of continuously operating chemical plants. Particular attention is paid to the use of process modeling tools such as Aspen that are used in industry and to problems of current interest. Each student team is assigned to evaluate and design a different technology and prepare a final design report.

For spring 2006, the theme of the course is to design technologies for lowering the emissions of climatically active gases from processes that use coal as the primary fuel.

In the ICE-Topics courses, various chemical engineering problems are presented and analyzed in an industrial context. Emphasis is on the integration of fundamentals with material property estimation, process control, product development, and computer simulation. Integration of societal issues, such as engineering ethics, environmental and safety considerations, and impact of technology on society are addressed in the context of case studies.

The broad context for this ICE-Topics module is the commonsense notion that, when designing something, one should plan for the off-normal conditions that may occur. A continuous process is conceived and designed as a steady-state operation. However, the process must start up, shut down, and operate in the event of disturbances, and so the time-varying behavior of the process should not be neglected. It is helpful to consider the operability of a process early in the design, when alternatives are still being compared. In this module, we will examine some tools that will help to evaluate the operability of the candidate process at the preliminary design stage, before substantial effort has been invested.

This course provides a brief introduction to the field of biocatalysis in the context of process design. Fundamental topics include why and when one may choose to use biological systems for chemical conversion, considerations for using free enzymes versus whole cells, and issues related to design and development of bioconversion processes. Biological and engineering problems are discussed as well as how one may arrive at both biological and engineering solutions.

This class covers molecular-level engineering and analysis of chemical processes. The use of chemical bonding, reactivity, and other key concepts in the design and tailoring of organic systems are discussed in this class. Specific class topics include application and development of structure-property relationships, and descriptions of the chemical forces and structural factors that govern supramolecular and interfacial phenomena for molecular and polymeric systems.

This course aims to connect the principles, concepts, and laws/postulates of classical and statistical thermodynamics to applications that require quantitative knowledge of thermodynamic properties from a macroscopic to a molecular level. It covers their basic postulates of classical thermodynamics and their application to transient open and closed systems, criteria of stability and equilibria, as well as constitutive property models of pure materials and mixtures emphasizing molecular-level effects using the formalism of statistical mechanics. Phase and chemical equilibria of multicomponent systems are covered. Applications are emphasized through extensive problem work relating to practical cases.

This course explores the theory of self-assembly in surfactant-water (micellar) and surfactant-water-oil (micro-emulsion) systems. It also introduces the theory of polymer solutions, as well as scattering techniques, light, x-ray, and neutron scattering applied to studies of the structure and dynamics of complex liquids, and modern theory of the liquid state relevant to structured (supramolecular) liquids.

This course covers the thermo-fluid dynamic phenomena and analysis methods for conventional and nuclear power stations. Specific topics include: kinematics and dynamics of two-phase flows; steam separation; boiling, instabilities, and critical conditions; single-channel transient analysis; multiple channels connected at plena; loop analysis including single and two-phase natural circulation; and subchannel analysis.

Tumor pathophysiology plays a central role in the growth, invasion, metastasis and treatment of solid tumors. This class applies principles of transport phenomena to develop a systems-level, quantitative understanding of angiogenesis, blood flow and microcirculation, metabolism and microenvironment, transport and binding of small and large molecules, movement of cancer and immune cells, metastatic process, and treatment response.

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