Experiences with Typical Product Design Projects

Over the past several years, we have formulated product-design projects for groups of three and four undergraduate students. These projects, which are executed during the second semester of the senior year, include designs of labs-on-a-chip for the high-throughput screening of pharmaceuticals, the CVD of electronic materials, and batch processes to manufacture pharmaceuticals. In these projects, emphasis shifts to the 3D configuration of the product, the molecular simulations of surface roughness using kinetic Monte-Carlo methods, and/or the scheduling of small batch processes - away from the simulation of commodity chemical processes.