chemical+engineering category archives

A reader asked me a question about using wikis for student group projects. I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear from my readers with suggestions as well.

I'm in Philadelphia this week for the AIChE Annual Meeting, which is its usual collection of networking and technical sessions about all things engineering. There was a session today on the application of Web 2.0 ideas in chemical engineering.

The September issue of Chemical Engineering Progress has an "Ask the Experts" column on Managing a Responsive Supply Network (pdf) by Ray Adams of SAP.

I am leaving independent consulting and Chicago. Many people have heard the basics - here are the details as I know them today.

Christina Pikas has some thoughts and questions about the kinds of people for whom blogging works as personal information management. Can scientists jump onto the blogging bandwagon? Does it make sense?

I was pleasantly surprised to find the announcement for session Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning" at the 2005 AIChE Annual Meeting. There is another session on Integrating Data, Knowledge Models and Tools."

Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands: Scripps Research Scientists Describe New Way of Interacting with the Unseen World of Proteins and DNA. 3D printing and computational chemistry doing cool things together.

"'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products" is a press release about chemical engineering, AI and product design from Purdue University. Go engineers!

Just in case you forgot that I am a chemical engineer by training, here is a link to the 49th Annual (Safety in) Ammonia Symposium that showed up in my mailbox today.

I had an interesting conversation the other day. An organization that does both research and manufacturing wants a system that will help them see knowledge across all their products. Does anyone know of such a monster?

On November 17, 2003 Michael Shafer's computer found the 40th known Mersenne prime, 220,996,011-1! Michael is a chemical engineering graduate student.

During the AIChE conference last month, and during many such conferences, the question of what is it to "do" chemical engineering arises. I've always liked to think of it as using chemistry, math, physics to develop salable goods and services. Even this doesn't fit all people who do chemical engineering.

At the AIChE meeting, Cawas Cooper from Air Products talked about a project that evolved from their Innovation Week, where people were encouraged to come up with new ideas and collaborate with their colleagues to sell the idea to their respective management. Those projects that get management blessing are pursued.

More from the AIChE meeting. Jonathan Worstell of Shell Chemical in Houston talked in a a number of sessions about the importance of Concurrent Engineering. In Worstell's view, the basic problem that Concurrent Engineering solves is that projects are too complex and too long for traditional serial engineering, where each phase...

Some more thoughts about designing experiements based on talks at the AIChE annual meeting.