CBE 142 is a lecture based course which teaches the fundamentals of chemical kinetics and reactor design. Definitions of CSTR, BSTR, PFR, etc. are introduced in previous courses, so the concepts are not entirely brand new for students. The course, however, delves deeper into the calculations necessary for reactor design including conversion and volume/pressure calculations of both steady and unsteady state reactors. Reaction kinetics is covered through rate laws and determination of rate laws. See topics below.
CBE 141, CBE 150B (May be taken concurrently)
3 hours of lecture and 1 hour of discussion per week, ~7-9 hours per problem set per week.
The course is typically taken immediately after taking CBE 150A and CBE 141 and concurrently with CBE 150B.
The three final required CBE courses can be taken after CBE 142. These courses are CBE 160, 162, and 154. Furthermore, upper division CBE electives such as CBE 180 (economics) list CBE 142 as a prerequisite.
The individual design projects and the problem sets heavily depend on using MATLAB to solve problems numerically. The problem sets took a lot of time since they required so much coding. The design project was more of an extended problem set; it was split into two parts. The second part, for instance, was 1 question with ~17 parts, so budget time for those too.
This was my favorite chemE course (out of 141, 142, 150A, 150B)! The material in the course was mostly straightforward, but the final and second midterm especially had very conceptual (not calculation-based) problems, so make sure to understand the reasoning behind all the concepts as well!
Written by: Samantha Marinkovich
Last edited: Fall 2018