Product Design

Recommended Prerequisites

Chemical Thermodynamics, Physical Chemistry of Surfaces, Introduction to Materials and Characterization, Mass and Energy Balances, Transport Phenomena I, II and III, Separation Processes I and II, Chemical Reactors I and II, Modeling, Simulation and Optimization, Management and Entrepreneurship.

Teaching Methods

Traditional (more expositive) lectures, development of case studies, encourage problem solving skills and systems view of products and processes, project developed by groups of 5-7 students under supervision (short meetings and presentations).

Learning Outcomes

More than understand all physico-chemical details of a given problem, the main of goal of this course is to learn how to design a new chemical product, from market surveys till the stage where the manufacturing process is considered. This learning is achieved by practise, supporting that practise in some concepts and methods and also discussing illustrative examples. More specific goals are: recognise the broad domain of chemical products (molecules, formulations and devices); understand the several stages of structured product design procedure and know associated methodologies; understand the design problem as the translation between different domains of problem representation; understand the problem of searching for materials with pre-specified properties; apply these concepts and methods to a specific problem, proposing a new concept for a chemical product (project developed by groups of 5-7 students under supervision).

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Introduction. Classes of chemical products: molecules, formulations and physico-chemical devices. Domains of representation of the design problem.
2. Structured procedures for product design and associated methods. The Ulrich and Eppinger model. Conceptual design and detailed design. Stages of conceptual design: identification of customer needs, translation of customer needs into product performance specifications, generation of product concepts, selection of product concepts, testing and refining of product concept, detailed product specification, product/process integration.
3. The property function. Direct and inverse searches. Categories of properties. General perspective of methods to estimate properties of molecular products. Quantitative structure-properties relationships.
4. Systematic methods to generate and select molecules/products, based on discrete optimization.
5. Project developed by groups of 5-7 students under supervision.

Head Lecturer(s)

Fernando Pedro Martins Bernardo

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Frequency: 30.0%
Project: 70.0%

Bibliography

- Cussler EL, Moggridge GD. Chemical Product Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2001.

- Wei J. Product Engineering: Molecular Structure and Properties. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007.

- Wesselingh JA, Kiil S, Vigild ME. Design and Development of Biological, Chemical, Food and Pharmaceutical Products. Chichester, England: Wiley; 2007.

- Ulrich KT, Eppinger SD. Product Design and Development. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw Hill; 2003