Difficulties in Teaching Chemical Product Design

More chemical engineering graduates are now hired by product-oriented companies than in process-dominated industries. To prepare these students, we can teach chemical product design for three types of products: devices, molecules, and microstructures. Chemical devices, exemplified by home oxygen supply and by domestic ultrafiltration of water, are designed with traditional unit operations. Molecules, like the salmon pigment astaxanthin and the prostate cancer drug Zoladex, also depend for their manufacture on unit operations. But microstructured products, like sunscreen and breakfast cereal, require inventing new tools for development. This paper will describe efforts to develop these tools.