Page 9 - Numerical Methods for Chemical Engineering

Preface

This text focuses on the application of quantitative analysis to the field of chemical engi-
neering. Modern engineering practice is becoming increasingly more quantitative, as the
use of scientific computing becomes ever more closely integrated into the daily activities
of all engineers. It is no longer the domain of a small community of specialist practitioners.
Whereas in the past, one had to hand-craft a program to solve a particular problem, carefully
husbanding the limited memory and CPU cycles available, now we can very quickly solve far
more complex problems using powerful, widely-available software. This has introduced the
need for research engineers and scientists to become computationally literate – to know the
possibilities that exist for applying computation to their problems, to understand the basic
ideas behind the most important algorithms so as to make wise choices when selecting and
tuning them, and to have the foundational knowledge necessary to navigate independently
through the literature.
This text meets this need, and is written at the level of a first-year graduate student
in chemical engineering, a consequence of its development for use at MIT for the course
10.34, “Numerical methods applied to chemical engineering.” This course was added in
2001 to the graduate core curriculum to provide all first-year Masters and Ph.D. students
with an overview of quantitative methods to augment the existing core courses in transport
phenomena, thermodynamics, and chemical reaction engineering. Care has been taken to
develop any necessary material specific to chemical engineering, so this text will prove
useful to other engineering and scientific fields as well. The reader is assumed to have taken
the traditional undergraduate classes in calculus and differential equations, and to have
some experience in computer programming, although not necessarily in AAB ® .
Even a cursory search of the holdings of most university libraries shows there to be a
great number of texts with titles that are variations of “Advanced Engineering Mathematics”
or “Numerical Methods.” So why add yet another?
I find that there are two broad classes of texts in this area. The first focuses on intro-
ducing numerical methods, applied to science and engineering, at the level of a junior
or senior undergraduate elective course. The scope is necessarily limited to rather simple
techniques and applications. The second class is targeted to research-level workers, either
higher graduate-level applied mathematicians or computationally-focused researchers in
science and engineering. These may be either advanced treatments of numerical methods
for mathematicians, or detailed discussions of scientific computing as applied to a specific
subject such as fluid mechanics.

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