A Chemical Product Design Course with a Quality Focus

Abstract

In recent years the chemical processes industry has faced important social, technical and economical challenges. As a result, the nature of its products, business strategies and ultimately the needs associated with the skills and technical knowledge of chemical engineers suffered enormous evolutions. One of such main changes is related to the emergence of chemical product design (CPD) as a specific and critical new field within the scope of chemical engineering. The importance of CPD teaching in chemical engineering courses is becoming well recognized by a number of different and leading universities. This paper presents a CPD course conceived and taught at the University of Coimbra to final year students in a fiveyear chemical engineering degree. It was developed with a special focus on the connections between CPD and quality engineering tools. The course was considered as a product by itself and conceived as such, namely through a clear identification of its strategic scope (mission, vision and values), aims (skills to be developed and knowledge to be acquired) and structural features (functional organization, time allocation, learning practices, programmatic contents and performance appraisal). A sample of two specific chemical product design projects carried out by teams of students is also described. This teaching experience has been very rewarding and stimulating from the perspectives of both faculty and students. It shows that CPD is indeed a new discipline that can and should be offered to more and more chemical engineering students all over the world, and that it can gain a lot through the application of quality management principles and quality engineering tools.