Chemistry scaled from the flask to the plant.
12 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes
Richard M. Felder & Ronald W. Rousseau · 1978
Teaches that almost every chemical process problem reduces to careful bookkeeping of mass and energy across a defined boundary, and that most student…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Investigation Report: Refinery Explosion and Fire, BP Texas City, Texas
United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board · 2007
Traces a refinery explosion that killed fifteen workers to organisational cost-cutting and a degraded safety culture, not just to a mis-set…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Graphical Design of Fractionating Columns
Warren L. McCabe & Ernest W. Thiele · 1925
Introduces a graphical stage-by-stage construction on the equilibrium diagram for finding the number of theoretical plates a distillation column…
+10 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Richard M. Felder & Ronald W. Rousseau
Teaches that almost every chemical process problem reduces to careful bookkeeping of mass and energy across a defined boundary, and that most student errors come from an unclear boundary rather than bad arithmetic.
United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board
Traces a refinery explosion that killed fifteen workers to organisational cost-cutting and a degraded safety culture, not just to a mis-set instrument, arguing that process safety fails at the management level before it fails at the valve.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of Energy
Argues that the biggest gains in industrial catalysis will come from controlling reactions at the atomic and molecular scale rather than from further empirical trial-and-error screening, and sets the research agenda that followed from that claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Warren L. McCabe & Ernest W. Thiele
Introduces a graphical stage-by-stage construction on the equilibrium diagram for finding the number of theoretical plates a distillation column needs, turning column design into a procedure an engineer can execute by hand.
Jacques Monod
Establishes that bacterial growth rate is a saturable function of a single limiting nutrient's concentration, giving biochemical engineering a quantitative kinetic law for cell growth analogous to Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics.
Donald Q. Kern
Reduces heat-exchanger design to a small set of correlations an engineer can apply by hand, and became the reference generations of plant designers actually used instead of first-principles heat transfer theory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026R. Byron Bird, Warren E. Stewart & Edwin N. Lightfoot
Unifies momentum, heat and mass transfer as three instances of one conservation-equation structure, arguing that an engineer who sees the shared form need not memorise three separate subjects.
Octave Levenspiel
Argues that reactor design is fundamentally a question of residence-time distribution, and that the same handful of ideal reactor models — batch, CSTR, PFR — bound the performance of any real one.
Dale E. Seborg, Thomas F. Edgar & Duncan A. Mellichamp
Treats a chemical plant as a dynamic system first and a steady-state flowsheet second, arguing that control has to be designed alongside the process rather than bolted on afterwards.
Henry Z. Kister
Argues that most distillation column failures trace to tray and packing hydraulics ignored at the design stage, not to errors in the underlying equilibrium-stage theory.
Pauline M. Doran
Presents a bioreactor as an ordinary chemical reactor with an unusually fussy, self-replicating catalyst, and works through the mass-transfer and kinetic limits that decide whether a fermentation scales from bench to plant.
J. D. Seader & Ernest J. Henley
Treats distillation, absorption and extraction as variations on one equilibrium-stage model, arguing that the choice between separation methods becomes an economic one once the stage calculations are understood.