(147a) Evolution of Teaching Transport Phenomena Courses in Chemical Engineering Curricula

Introduction. Transport Phenomena began as a discipline in chemical engineering with the goal of systematizing the common principles of unit operations such as distillation, sedimentation, evaporation, drying, chemical operations, etc., due in this way it is easier their treatment and to avoid to study them one by one. For example, distillation, lixiviation, liquid ? liquid extraction, gas absorption and other operations share the same principle. This discipline started more or less in 1959, 1960, being the pioneers of this material R. Byron Bird, Warren E. Stewart and Edwin N. Lightfoot, through several publications that culminated with the book ?Transport Phenomena? in 1960. The scientific and technological community of those years, and even 20 years later, were reluctant to accept transport phenomena as a new discipline in Chemical Engineering curricula. Therefore, it is reasonable to do some research on the evolution of transport phenomena courses in several national and international Universities and other educational institutions. It is also interesting to know how the teaching process has evolved due to advances in computational methods. Methodology. Several national and international universities were consulted throughout an internet survey regarding transport phenomena courses taught in the undergraduate programs of chemical engineering. Besides, several books were revised about chemical engineering of the years 1940, 1950, etc. and also the books of one author or group of authors were revised through their different editions along the years, until the most recent. The opinion of old professors still active and retired professors from different universities was also considered as a valuable contribution to this study, particularly the opinion of professors who went through the transition of teaching transport phenomena as a full course. In all of these activities, there was the valuable participation of involved students and the principal author of this material who also went through all the process of transport phenomena courses evolution while being a student and even as a professor in his home university. Results and Discussion. It was found that the generality is to present in these courses the momentum, heat and mass balances, in laminar flow, using the differential element and general equations, some processes in transient state and all of this until before 1985. During this same time, unit operation books began to include topics of transport phenomena in the first sections. Consecutive sections in the books still dealt with unit operations in a traditional way. It was observed that there were not relationships among sections as if they were designed for different courses, little usage of transport phenomena concepts and theories was found in general. This is perhaps the reason of the slowly introduction of transport processes in Chemical Engineering curricula. In a lot of universities it was preferred to study in the academic programs each transport phenomena in its respective unit operation. However, in spite of there was some availability to teach some parts of this subject, that was not enough, due teaching these topics and concepts in disperse way, was not going to achieve the unification of all of these concepts and criteria, and this subject of transport phenomena would lose its identity, without obtaining a systematization of all of these principles. Even so far, some universities present the topic of transport phenomena mixed with its respective unit operation. After this period, some progress was observed and each time this discipline is conceived as a scientific fundament to design the industrial pieces of equipment. More topics were added to these subjects, for example the study and deduction of correlations to calculate the interface parameters: friction factor, heat and mass transfer convective coefficients in order to design pieces of different equipment. Also, the study of turbulent flow was introduced. This new knowledge was incorporated in different optional subjects, offered in chemical engineering, and in other careers, such as: bio engineering, food engineering, bio genetics, fabrication of medicines, etc. Of course, some differences were observed in these approaches. This indicates that transport phenomena advances according to the needs of equipment design where the operations of physical and chemical processes are developed and also according to the scientific needs for new models. The opinion of this author, after this survey and analysis, is that Transport Phenomena in the undergraduate program in Chemical Engineering should have the following contents: Calculations of molecular transport parameters, study of problems in laminar flow in transient state, using the differential element and general equations, turbulent flow, study of the heat and mass transfer coefficients, friction factors in the interface, etc. The objective of Transport Phenomena should be to present in a fundamental, systematized and unified form the common principles of unit operations. This will allow establishing for laminar and turbulent flow the estimation of phase parameters and the interface parameters, to find the velocity, temperature and concentration parameters, through the solution of the mathematical models. All these should be done with the goal of obtaining correlations for the parameters of phase and interface, as a preparation and tool for the modeling and design of the required equipment to carry out unit operations and chemical reactions.