Teaching chemical product design

The chemical industry today includes both commodity products and higher value-added products. While the design of commodities is dominated by the process costs, higher value-added products also depend on product design, including discovery, product selection, and time-to-market. Chemical engineering education has sensibly begun to change toward courses on both process and product design. However, while there is an emerging consensus that these changes should take place, there is no clear agreement on what the changes should be. Moreover, these new directions are very difficult to teach, at least in the current environment. This paper will discuss different efforts to incorporate product design into the chemical engineering curriculum and different successes in doing so. However, while the value of including this material seems unquestioned, the way in which it is best taught is unclear.