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raabepaint
New Contributor

Can you suggest any chemical engineering courses for career development?

There is plenty of chemistry knowledge in our R&D department but we are lacking in the physics angle.  We are a coatings company: not only do we have to scale up what we develop for manufacturing but there are customer formulations that need to be batched up and occasionally, when we do that, we have problems.  These problems can be related to mixing, container size, mixing blade style and size, temperature, rate of pouring, material, etc.  WE formulate and develop both organic/solvent based products but water based.  Are there classes or seminars that can help enlighten organic chemists on the physics of mixing coatings? Thanks.

4 Replies
dsauer08
New Contributor

Re: Can you suggest any chemical engineering courses for career development?

As no one else has replied, I'll give it a shot.  Also note this is coming from a graduating chemist with some ChE classes.

I would think you might need some fairly in depth training in fluid dynamics and heat transfer depending on the difficulty of these issues. ACS offers a course at the upcoming national convention that covers some of this stuff but you would probably have better results from AIChE's online courses.

Hope that helps

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raabepaint
New Contributor

Re: Can you suggest any chemical engineering courses for career development?

Thanks for your response.  I will keep the AlChE site in mind.  I did find a few online classes somewhere in the ACS site that we will be arranging soon but AlChE does offer a few ideas when I can get to it. 

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jcastro
New Contributor

Re: Can you suggest any chemical engineering courses for career development?

Besides fluid dynamics/heat transfer, a course in unit operations could be helpful.

A course in experimental design and one in chemical formulations development were offered by DuPont back during the Eighties.  Experimental design is especially important, because, in my experience, this sort of thing is never discussed in chemistry curricula.  Fractional factorial, Box-Behnken, and Plackett-Berman designs can save millions of dollars, especially in the scale-up stages.  (The old practice of "change one thing at a time" can walk you right off the optimum conditions for a process if there's a saddle point in the system, which is not uncommon.)

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part_char
New Contributor

Re: Can you suggest any chemical engineering courses for career development?

It is hard to optimize systems that involve liquids containing 5 to 60 volume percent of particles.  Many of practical and theoretical approaches to understanding these systems are described in the Activities > ERPT and the Newsletter links from the AIChE's Particle Technology Forum's website at http://aicheptf.org/ 

The most direct link to the ERPT tutorials is http://www.erpt.org/retiredsite/default.htm

My 1988 book dealing with the basic principles of slurries -- Dispersing Powders in Liquids (Handbook of Powder Technology) -- is available through Amazon.com (some at prices higher than he original!!).

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