tce EDUCATION
I
T seems to practising engineers
like myself that in recent years,
chemical engineering education in
universities has had less and less to do
with engineering practice.
As recently as the 1980s, chemical
engineering courses were delivered with
significant input and guidance from
experienced practitioners, but the content of
many UK degree programmes now consists
almost exclusively of mathematics and
science delivered by academic researchers,
very few of whom have ever practised as an
engineer.
Whilst an engineer is a competent
mathematician and scientist, there is
far more to an engineering education
than acquiring knowledge in these
areas. Engineers bring these together
with professional judgment, intuitive
understanding and a number of key creative
skills to provide viable solutions to a certain
class of real-world problems.
losing skills
So what has been lost in the move
from practitioner-led to researcher-led
engineering education?
Firstly (and arguably most damaging),
drawing skills. Engineers think and
model plants using drawings, as well as
mathematics and science. For example, you
cannot work out the system head associated
with a pump from first principles. You need
to prepare a scale drawing of the system,
38 www.tcetoday.com october 2013
fit the pipework where it goes (taking into
consideration zoning, safety, aesthetics,
planning considerations, economics and
so on) and then measure the length of the
resulting pipe and the number of fittings
required to take it from source to destination.
The fact that plant layout will always
generate few research papers might be
why many departments no longer teach
it at all, but engineering practice is more
art than science. Its creative, but what
makes it interesting is that its innovation is
constrained.
This is not the only deficiency consider
the process engineers signature drawing,
the P+ID. In many institutions we now see
book-illustration-style approximations of
P+IDs in final-year design projects, covering
a single unit operation, and produced with
Google Sketch or Visio using the non-UK
conventions built into the software. A
drawing that is used to facilitate management
of the complex interaction between a
collection of process units is being used in
Whilst an engineer is a
competent mathematician
and scientist, there is far
more to an engineering
education than acquiring
knowledge in these areas
the context of a single unit operation, and
then poorly.
Todays chemical engineering students
often seem to lack an understanding of the
different types of valves, pumps, instruments,
heat exchangers and other basic components
of process plant available, of the practicalities
of plant commissioning, operation and
maintenance, and of the basics of practical
process control. And these deficiencies are
evident in their P+IDs.
Neither are academic P+IDs generally
compliant with relevant standards in most
universities I have visited, there are few
genuine engineering drawings to be seen.
Simplified process flow diagrams without
borders, title blocks or standard notation
maybe, but genuine full-system P+IDs and
layout drawings that look remotely like their
professional counterparts are usually absent.
Other engineering disciplines continue to
teach conventional engineering drawing, but
many chemical engineering departments
have stopped teaching drawing only because
none of the staff knew how to do it, how to
use the industry-standard AutoCad package,
nor knew how important drawings are for
communication with other disciplines.
Then there is the way students are taught
to perform process calculations, a strange
mixture of the distant past and a speculative
future. Student designs often rely heavily
on mechanistic hand calculation design
methodologies straight from Sinnott
(which rightly belong in the era of the

slide rule), black-box specialist simulation
packages (the output of which is rarely
genuinely understood by students), or
specialist packages used only by academics.
Professional engineers do most of their
calculations with Excel, with maybe a bit
of VBA for knottier problems. Teaching
anything else is at best a waste of the
students time.
Thirdly, the basis of academic calculations
is virtually always steady-state, which is fine
for beginners to mass and energy balance,
but third-year design projects on this basis
are unacceptably simplistic. Students need
to understand the concept of the design
envelope. How are they to comprehend
process control if they cannot conceive of
system disturbances? How are they to carry
out a HAZOP on such a system?
What has replaced engineering content?
Science and mathematics but engineering
is not a kind of applied mathematics, and
scientific research generally has little to do
with engineering practice, so these are not
interchangeable components.
It is my observation that UK chemical
engineering departments are nowadays
mostly made up of people with first
degrees in science. They wish to teach what
they know, and consequently their non-
engineering interests find their way into
the curriculum, filling the gaps left by the
engineering few of them know how to teach
in context.
Similarly there are those whose research
EXPERIENCE:
the father of wisdom?
Sean Moran argues the case for a return to
practioner-led teaching in universities
is based in mathematical or computer
modelling who attempt to substitute their
skill-set for those of the process designer,
producing students with no mental
conception of how complex systems interact.
A genuine understanding of process
control requires some knowledge of the
characteristics of various types of system
components. The syllabus taught in most UK
universities is, according to process control
expert Myke King, up to 70 years out of date
in terms of practical application, or has never
really been relevant to process engineering.
These are the hoops that we have our
students jump though, and no one may have
checked back with practitioners to ensure
that they still had any practical usefulness
until now is it time for a rethink?
what to do about it
We cannot change the makeup of our
departments, and even if we could, we
would be foolish to do so. Though there is no
correlation between research excellence and
Engineering is not a kind
of applied mathematics,
and scientific research
generally has little to do with
engineering practice, so these
are not interchangeable
CAREERS
EDUCATION tce
teaching excellence, we need a high research
ranking to bring in the best students, and
we need the scientists who publish in high
impact journals to give us this.
But we must not kid ourselves there
may be sound reasons to staff a department
with scientific researchers, but this does not
mean that research is the same as practice, or
theoretical modelling a substitute for design.
These are not functionally equivalent.
More radical still, professional chemical
engineers do not do exams for a living. They
design process plants, or they run them.
Exams will always be a poor way of assessing
whether students are going to be good
engineers.
So why not get our students to do what
engineers do? Produce the drawings and
other deliverables that engineers do, using
the tools that they use? Wouldnt getting them
to do what engineers do be the best test of
whether they are going to be good engineers?
Wouldnt it mean that we and they wouldnt
have to waste our time teaching and learning
irrelevant skills and knowledge, freeing up
more time for useful stuff?
Why not align our teaching practices
as closely as possible with the real-world
practice of engineering (taking particular
account of the team environment in which
engineers typically work) and bring real-
world engineering practice into the course
content wherever possible?
But what about academic rigour, some will
say, as if maths and science were harder than
october 2013 www.tcetoday.com 39
tce EDUCATION
First-year Nottingham students show their vice chancellor
they are no strangers to P&IDs and plant layout drawings.
Students from both the now
highly modular UK education
system and didactic overseas
systems do find our open-
ended and multidisciplinary
nature very challenging at
first, but are seemingly willing
to do significantly more work
than many in academia would
expect when they understand
that engineers are teaching
them to be engineers.
40 www.tcetoday.com october 2013
engineering, rather than the simple steps
up to its threshold? This is a straw man we
are reintroducing engineering to our course
without having to lose rigour in assessment,
or the teaching of any core chemical
engineering principles.
how we do it
I teach professional-style process design
from the start of year one, based on case
studies from my professional practice.
Our students learn to produce
progressively-improving P&IDs, plant layout
drawings, and orthographic projections
in AutoCad from the start of the course,
working in teams to carry out three realistic
design projects per year for the first two
years of the course.
CAD is taught by someone with four years
of professional engineering design drafting
experience, and even our first-years now
produce professional-looking deliverables.
Ive been teaching layout so far based on
my own experience, but Im bringing back
some of the content of our old layout course
next year for the second years to supplement
my less formal approach. The principles of
process design used by professionals have
changed little in decades, shaped as they
have been by the structure of an industry
which still essentially does the same job as it
always did.
In order to support this, teaching process
control will be moving towards a more
realistic grasp of what chemical engineers do
under the guidance of chartered engineers
with decades of practical experience.
Our engineering materials modules will
similarly focus on the things chemical
engineers care about (mainly the suitability
of potential materials of construction at
a systems possible operating pressures,
temperatures, and chemical conditions)
and safety has moved from being an out-
of-context stand-alone course to being
embedded throughout the course, most
notably in the design content.
Nottingham University has overseas
campuses in China and Malaysia, which
I have recently visited to introduce both
staff and students to the practitioner-led
approach.
The Malaysia campus has dual
accreditation from IChemE and the Board
of Engineers Malaysia, the latter of which,
according to local reports, is likely to
strongly approve of the complex open-ended
problem-solving nature of our approach.
Our China campus is newer and the
approach has proved valuable as a way of
aligning the campuses in advance of their
pending first accreditation.
Feedback about the changes from
past students now in industry, present
students, industry, and academics both
across our campuses and outside is
consistently good. Students from both the
now highly-modular UK education system
and didactic overseas systems do find our
open-ended and multidisciplinary nature
very challenging at first, but are seemingly
willing to do significantly more work than
many in academia would expect when they
understand that engineers are teaching them
to be engineers.
where next?
Our students are now taking new skills into
the third year of the course, and we have
realigned our year 3 design project to match
the skills they are bringing.
Year 3 design projects will require
integration of safety, cost and robustness
considerations into system level design, and
will require the production of professional-
quality engineering drawings. The quality
of their designs will be assessed via design
reviews with cross-questioning led by
practising chartered chemical engineers.
Our popular year in industry option
allows us to turn out graduates with skills and
knowledge we cannot impart in an academic
setting. We are looking to place all of our
students in companies where they can get
genuine engineering experience, and we
are encouraged by the feedback so far that
our second years have practical skills that
graduates from other institutions do not. tce
Sean Moran (sean.moran@nottingham.
ac.uk) is an associate professor and
ExxonMobil teaching fellow at the
engineering faculty of Nottingham
University, UK