Teaching Chemical Engineering Courses in a Biomolecular Engineering Program

Faisal Shaikh; Serdar Ozturk

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Conference: 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana
Publication Date: June 26, 2016
Start Date: June 26, 2016
End Date: June 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-68565-5
ISSN: 2153-5965
Conference Session: Chemical Engineering Courses in Emergent Areas
Tagged Division: Chemical Engineering
Page Count: 8
DOI: 10.18260/p.26020
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/26020
Download Count: 500

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Paper Authors

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Faisal Shaikh Milwaukee School of Engineering

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Dr. Faisal Shaikh joined MSOE about 6 years ago in a unique interdisciplinary engineering program called BioMolecular engineering. The program was a combination of molecular biology and chemical engineering and is unique in the nation. Being the lone chemical engineering faculty member in the program, he was tasked of developing a significant number of the core chemical engineering courses, albeit with a focus on biology. The program recently successfully went through the initial ABET accreditation. He is also a champion of industry-academia partnerships in senior design projects and has been instrumental in bringing full industry sponsorship to the majority of the senior design projects in the program he teaches in.

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Serdar Ozturk MSOE

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Dr.Serdar Ozturk is a trained chemical engineer. After receiving his PhD in chemical engineering at Texas A&M university, he became an assistant professor in Biomolecular Engineering program at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE). This diverse program is an emerging discipline with a focus on molecular biology, bioinformatics and chemical engineering. Considering the expectations in the bio process industry, Dr.Ozturk was responsible from developing and modifying many chemical engineering based courses (Reactor Design, Thermodynamics I and II, etc.) in the program. His research and scholarly interests include biotechnology, thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, nanofluids, microfluidics and methods in engineering education. He has actively involved in the growing of BioE program and sought opportunities to introduce the new program to the local industry. He is a member of ASEE and AIChe.

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Abstract

A new interdisciplinary engineering program-BioMolecular Engineering- was launched in 2009 the Midwest that combined the curriculum of chemical engineering with molecular biology. This posed significant challenges in developing the chemical engineering courses with a ‘bio-focus’ so that they would complement the bio-skillset provided in the new curriculum. The chemical engineering courses offered in the program were Transport Phenomena, Thermodynamics, Process Control, Reactor Design and Unit Operations. The authors researched various ‘hybrid’ chemical and biochemical engineering programs before developing a set of novel courses geared towards bioprocessing. All of these courses were designed with chemical engineering fundamentals applied primarily to bioprocessing.

In this paper the authors who are both trained chemical engineers will share their course syllabi, outcomes and topics and important additions and modifications that they have done on traditional core chemical engineering course formats. The Reactor Design course (called as Kinetics and BioReactor design) included more emphasis on stirred tank reactors with unsteady state batch operation due to their applications in bioprocessing. The bioprocessing projects (such as from biofuel and biopharmaceutical industry) assigned to students will be shared in this paper. The Unit Operations course (called as Unit Operations-Production Scale Bioseparations) did not focus as much on distillation (being a heat intensive process) in detail. While distillation is a workhorse for separations in chemical processing industry, other techniques(eg supercritical CO2 extraction, freeze drying, chromatography etc.) find more importance in bioseparations. The lab experiments for this course follow the same logic and are modified accordingly. This paper includes relevant details of the labs and a list of experiments to serve as a model for similar labs in such hybrid programs. In the Process Control course (now called BioProcess control), the inherently non-linearity of bioprocesses is realized and analyzed. Additional topics like Model predictive control are introduced. Overall this paper provides an excellent summary of the modifications that would be needed in traditional chemical engineering courses that are part of a hybrid ‘bio’ focused chemical engineering program. This paper would be a great reference for any chemical engineering faculty considering or assigned to teach similar courses in such hybrid programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

We would prefer the paper to be part of the regular session.

Citation
Format

Shaikh, F., & Ozturk, S. (2016, June), Teaching Chemical Engineering Courses in a Biomolecular Engineering Program Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.26020

TY - CPAPER
AB - A new interdisciplinary engineering program-BioMolecular Engineering- was launched in 2009 the Midwest that combined the curriculum of chemical engineering with molecular biology. This posed significant challenges in developing the chemical engineering courses with a ‘bio-focus’ so that they would complement the bio-skillset provided in the new curriculum. The chemical engineering courses offered in the program were Transport Phenomena, Thermodynamics, Process Control, Reactor Design and Unit Operations. The authors researched various ‘hybrid’ chemical and biochemical engineering programs before developing a set of novel courses geared towards bioprocessing. All of these courses were designed with chemical engineering fundamentals applied primarily to bioprocessing.

In this paper the authors who are both trained chemical engineers will share their course syllabi, outcomes and topics and important additions and modifications that they have done on traditional core chemical engineering course formats. The Reactor Design course (called as Kinetics and BioReactor design) included more emphasis on stirred tank reactors with unsteady state batch operation due to their applications in bioprocessing. The bioprocessing projects (such as from biofuel and biopharmaceutical industry) assigned to students will be shared in this paper. The Unit Operations course (called as Unit Operations-Production Scale Bioseparations) did not focus as much on distillation (being a heat intensive process) in detail. While distillation is a workhorse for separations in chemical processing industry, other techniques(eg supercritical CO2 extraction, freeze drying, chromatography etc.) find more importance in bioseparations. The lab experiments for this course follow the same logic and are modified accordingly. This paper includes relevant details of the labs and a list of experiments to serve as a model for similar labs in such hybrid programs. In the Process Control course (now called BioProcess control), the inherently non-linearity of bioprocesses is realized and analyzed. Additional topics like Model predictive control are introduced. Overall this paper provides an excellent summary of the modifications that would be needed in traditional chemical engineering courses that are part of a hybrid ‘bio’ focused chemical engineering program. This paper would be a great reference for any chemical engineering faculty considering or assigned to teach similar courses in such hybrid programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

We would prefer the paper to be part of the regular session.

AU - Faisal Shaikh
AU - Serdar Ozturk
CY - New Orleans, Louisiana
DA - 2016/06/26
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Teaching Chemical Engineering Courses in a Biomolecular Engineering Program
UR - https://peer.asee.org/26020
DO - 10.18260/p.26020
ER -