Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283 293

www.elsevier.com/locate/compchemeng

Education in process systems engineering: past, present and future

John Perkins *
Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology, Center for Process Systems Engineering, Imperial College of Science,
Technology and Medicine, London SW 7 2BY, UK
Received 16 August 2000; received in revised form 27 November 2000; accepted 27 November 2000

Abstract
The term Process Systems Engineering may be traced back at least as far as the early 1960s. In parallel with the emergence
of a research agenda for this new sub-discipline, pioneers of the subject began to consider the nature of education in process
systems engineering, and its relationship to the broader chemical engineering curriculum. In this paper, a personal view of the
history of the development of education in our field will be given. It will be argued that two complementary approaches have been
pursued, each of which has played an important role both within the sub-discipline itself and in the context of the development
of chemical engineering education more broadly. On the one hand, pedagogical materials have been developed and courses
delivered covering important advances in process systems engineering as they have emerged from the research community. As a
result, the teaching of design and control methodologies, techniques and tools has become more systematic and comprehensive in
the past four decades, reflecting the strides made by the research community in tackling these complex engineering problems. In
parallel with these developments, educators have been concerned to develop curricula and courses designed to help students to
adopt a systems approach to engineering problem solving. Here, the objective has been not so much to help students to learn
about the application of specific ideas and methods to particular classes of engineering problem. Rather the aim has been to
encourage students to adopt a particular, systematic approach to their entire professional practice. Advances in both directions
will be illustrated through examples taken from the literature, as well as through an account of the process systems engineering
components of the chemical engineering course at Imperial College. Finally, the author will present his personal view on
developments which are likely to emerge in the future, as process systems engineering and chemical engineering continue to
respond to external changes as well as to the continuing development of our subject. 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Keywords: Process systems engineering; Education; Chemical engineering

1. Introduction
The Process Systems Engineering conference series
was inaugurated in 1982, at the initiative of Professor
Takeichiro Takamatsu, then of Kyoto University.
However, the term systems engineering has a much
longer history, and by the early 1960s a number of
chemical engineers had recognised the opportunities to
develop systems concepts appropriate to the practice of
their profession. As early as 1959, T.J. Williams, at that
time an employee of the Monsanto company, used the
opportunity provided by an invitation from the Univer* Tel.: +44-207-589-5111.
E-mail address: j.perkins@ic.ac.uk (J. Perkins).

sity of Texas to deliver the Schoch lectures for that year

to present his impressively broad vision of Systems
Engineering for the Process Industries (Williams, 1961).
Huckaba and Monet (1963) in the Foreword to a CEP
Symposium Series volume, entitled Process Systems
Engineering and published in 1963, stated that:
Chemical engineers are primarily interested in process systems engineering in which the systems approach is employed in the design and operation of
chemical processing plants.

In the same year, we find in the text of the Inaugural

Lecture of Roger Sargent as Professor of Chemical
Engineering at Imperial College (Sargent, 1963):

0098-1354/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

PII: S 0 0 9 8 - 1 3 5 4 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 7 4 6 - 3

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J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

broad consideration of the interaction between

the performance of individual units and the requirements of the process has always been a feature of
good process design, but in recent years it has become fashionable to refer to this as optimisation,
and it has even come to be regarded as a new,
separate branch of engineering, known as systems
engineering. However, new names rarely appear
without good cause and in this field the advent of
automatic computers has given rise to a whole range
of techniques which have revolutionised the approach here

It is not the purpose of this paper to trace the history

of the development of process systems engineering. Our
goal will be to seek to map changes in the education of
students of chemical engineering, which have resulted
from the emergence of process systems engineering
concepts in the past four decades or so. It will be
argued that there are two strands to these developments. On the one hand, pedagogical materials have
been developed and courses delivered covering important advances in process systems engineering as they
have emerged from the research community. In tracing
these developments, a method used by Freshwater
(1989) to trace the development of the conceptual basis
of chemical engineering itself will be employed, viz. the
analysis of key textbooks. Inevitably, in a paper of this
length, it will not be possible to give a comprehensive
review. Nor will such a review be necessary for our
purposes. Rather, we shall focus on what seem to be
some of the pioneering contributions (restricted to
those published in English) in order to investigate the
emergence of the major themes in process systems
engineering education.
The second strand of educational development concerns curricula and courses designed to help students to
acquire and adopt a systems approach to engineering
problem solving. While there are much broader questions involved in pursuing the educational objectives
associated with this strand, and the issues extend well
beyond the boundaries of process systems engineering,
nevertheless process systems engineers have made pioneering developments here also. Indeed, there is some
evidence that the desire to help students to develop the
skills needed to tackle complex engineering problems
partly motivated the early research in process systems
engineering.

2. Historical developments-techniques and tools

Process Systems Engineering is concerned with the
development of techniques and tools to address the
generic manufacturing problems of design, operation

and control for the process industries. In tracing the

pedagogical developments in the field, it will be convenient to consider control and design separately, since
these topics have tended to appear in curricula as
separate courses.

2.1. Process control

Compulsory courses in process control can be found
in the undergraduate curriculum of some departments
as early as 1950 (e.g. Shemilt, 1980) and textbooks on
the subject were published in that decade.
One of the early textbooks to appear, first published
in 1955, was A.J. Youngs An Introduction to Process
Control System Design (Young, 1955). Young was an
employee of ICI, who in 1946 had been given the
responsibility of setting up what became the Central
Instrument Laboratory of that company. The book
reflects the long-standing concerns of industrial process
control engineers keen to promote the benefits of their
technology. To quote from the Preface to the book:
The first necessity at the present time is to ensure
that the most economic use is made of existing
knowledge and equipment. The second is to show
plant designers that the full benefits of automatic
control cannot be enjoyed without their co-operation, and to obtain their co-operation (Young,
1955).

Chapter 1 of the book is entitled Economics and

discusses in some detail the benefits that may be expected through the application of appropriate automatic control technology in the process industries. A
treatment of the characteristics of control loops and of
plant dynamics is followed by a chapter on Plant
Controllability (chapter 5), which is defined by Young
as the ease or difficulty of controlling a plant. In
subsequent chapters, it is shown how frequency response methods may be used to quantify controllability, as well as to set up appropriate process control
systems.
In the year following the publication of Youngs
book, Norman Ceaglske, a Professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, published Automatic Process Control for Chemical Engineers, a
textbook based on an elementary course taught to
undergraduates at that university (Ceaglske, 1956). After a short introductory section describing in qualitative
terms the components of process control systems, the
remainder of the book is concerned with mathematical
techniques for the analysis of simple control systems.
While being somewhat narrow in its focus, this book
appears to represent the first academic text in process
control specifically designed for chemical engineering
undergraduates.

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

Another pioneering book produced within in an industrial context is Page Buckleys Techniques of Process
Control, published in 1964 (Buckley, 1964). Buckley
had extensive industrial experience as a process control
engineer with Du Pont. In the Preface to his book,
Buckley is at great pains to emphasise the synthetic
nature of process control:
we are not so much interested in knowing precisely how a system behaves as we are in knowing
how to design it so that it will operate satisfactorily.
In other words, we are primarily interested in synthesis rather than analysis, in logic rather than
computation.

After a review of developments in control up to 1964,

the book deals first with the Mathematics of Process
Control (Laplace and z-transformations, frequency response, block diagram algebra, and linearisation methods). The following section on Process Control Theory
includes an important chapter on Overall Process Control as well as discussion of more traditional topics such
as Stability, Sampled Data and Distributed Systems.
Three more sections deal with the dynamics and control
of the important process operations of fluid flow, heat
transfer and distillation. Throughout the book, theory
is used to help decide the important structural questions
associated with the synthesis of process control systems.
Although both of the industrial books discussed
above represent pioneering efforts to codify the subject,
their presentation probably made their adoption as the
basis of first courses in process control somewhat impractical. Indeed it is clear that the authors themselves
considered practitioners rather than undergraduate students as their prime audience. By the 1960s, a clear
need had emerged to provide undergraduate texts in the
subject to serve the growing number of departments
around the world keen to incorporate process control
into their core curriculum. Nineteen sixty-five saw the
publication of a book that was to dominate the field for
what was, in retrospect, a surprising length of time,
Process Systems Analysis and Control by Coughanowr
and Koppel (1965). The book was developed from the
required senior course, which had been given at Purdue
University since 1960.
In contrast to the books of Young and of Buckley,
the focus of Coughanowr and Koppel is on the analysis
of process and control system dynamics. Of the books
32 chapters, only one (chapter 23) deals with process
applications, illustrating the issues faced in the implementation of complex process control systems through
a discussion of distillation column control.
A survey of process control education in North
America in 1978 (Seborg, 1980) showed that of the 135
schools which responded to the survey, 69 were using

285

Coughanowr and Koppels book for their undergraduate control teaching, and a further seven for graduate
level teaching. Luybens book (1974), published 4 years
before the survey was conducted, had the second largest
number of entries with 21. Again, the emphasis of the
book was on analysis with a very short section of six
pages devoted to control-systems design concepts). In
hindsight, this dichotomy between the analytical treatment of the subject in the most popular university texts,
and the published writings of industrial process control
practitioners placing great emphasis on synthetic issues
is quite striking.
In the last two decades, textbooks providing a balance between analysis and synthesis of process control
systems have appeared. Of course, the extent of this
rebalancing varies from text-to-text. Thus, for example,
Stephanopoulos
book,
published
in
1984,
(Stephanopoulos, 1984) features significant sections
covering design and implementation issues for process
control systems. Seborg, Edgar and Mellichamp (1989)
includes one section at the end of their book on Process
Control Strategies. Ogunnaike and Ray (1994) book
includes a final chapter on Process Control System
Synthesis, in which several case studies based on unit
operations (distillation, reactors of various kinds) are
presented. Marlin (1995) includes extensive discussion
of the benefits of process control as well as a comprehensive treatment of process control system design.
Whilst it might be argued that the inclusion of this
more synthetic material in modern books reflects recent
developments in process control research, it is clear that
the early practitioners in their writings placed more
emphasis on these aspects of process control than did
the developers of early course materials. Moreover,
published material was available quite early (particularly Buckley, 1964) which might have been used to
form a basis for a balanced, systems-oriented treatment
of process control topics at undergraduate level. It is
not easy to establish the impact of the chosen emphasis
of early process control teaching on the development of
research and practice in the area, but anyone involved
in university education would find it difficult to accept
that there have been no consequences of importance.

2.2. Process design

The state of the art in process design teaching in the
early 1960s is summarised by Sherwood in the Preface
to his book A Course in Process Design (Sherwood,
1963):
It has been common to include a senior Plant
Design or Projects course in chemical engineering
curricula. The purpose is to provide the student with
an experience in synthesis, pulling together his
knowledge of science and engineering for application

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J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

to a practical design problem. The problems are long

and complicated, often requiring 10 or more h/week
during an entire term, and a lengthy report. Much
handbook engineering is involved and considerable
time is devoted to cost estimation.

Sherwood goes on to contrast the traditional approach with his proposed design course involving the
following key features.
1. The use of the case method, with process engineering problems selected to clarify the meaning of
engineering design.
2. An organisation of the principles and philosophy of
process design as a framework on which to hang
the cases.
3. The use of four to eight cases per term, so as to
include a variety of technical subjects.
4. The inclusion of cases where answers cannot be
obtained by analysis alone, requiring the students
to turn to the laboratory for missing information.
5. The requirement that the student invent process
schemes.
6. A diversity of case types, including some which can
be handled by sophisticated scientific analysis, as
well as some in which labour costs or fluctuating
selling prices are much more important than the
result of analysis.
7. Inclusion of cases based on principles which the
student has not previously studied but which he
can get by a limited amount of reading, or from
guest lecturers brought in for the purpose.
In his book, Sherwood first discusses the key elements of process design, and the role of analysis in
design problem solving. There is an interesting emphasis on formal cost optimisation in this first chapter, and
indeed throughout the book. Subsequent chapters
present a wide variety of carefully selected design case
studies which can be used either as the basis for student
exercises or possibly in an expository fashion to illustrate key issues in process design.
Sherwoods book is a mine of useful insights. Its
careful study would give students valuable experience
and enable those with the ability to learn general
lessons from particular experiences to develop process
design knowledge and skills. However, what is missing
is a conceptual framework and systematic methods to
tackle particularly the synthetic element in the solution
of process design problems. This missing element had
been identified in the 1960s, and led to the initiation of
research into the field of process synthesis. One of the
fruits of this research has been the development of
pedagogical materials suitable for use at undergraduate
level.
One of the pioneers in the development of teaching
materials based on a systematic approach to process

design problems was Dale Rudd, who led the development of two fine textbooks addressing the need for a
conceptual framework to support pedagogical activities
in process design. The first of these, Strategy of Process
Engineering was published in 1968.
The treatment of design methods and tools in the
book was comprehensive for the time. The book is
divided into three parts dealing with, The Creation and
Assessment of Alternatives; Optimisation, and Engineering in the Presence of Uncertainty. The first part
begins with a discussion of the major issue of problem
definition, converting what Rudd calls a Primitive
Problem into one or more specific problems amenable
to the application of engineering knowledge and skills.
Fig. 1, taken from the book, illustrates the approach
which Rudd advocates here. Subsequent chapters in
this Part deal with methods to evaluate alternative
solutions based on economic and technical criteria.
There is very little in this book on process synthesis,
other than a reference to two of Rudds recently published papers (Rudd, 1968; Masso & Rudd, 1969) on
the subject. Clearly, the publication of this book came
slightly too early to capitalise on the results of research
in process synthesis (but see below). The other two
parts of the book describe techniques and tools to
address on the one hand the development of optimal
process systems and on the other the modelling and
design of systems taking account of various kinds of
uncertainty.
Strategy of Process Engineering is the only systems
text to be recognised by Freshwater in his review of the
literature of chemical engineering (Freshwater, 1989).
Freshwaters evaluation is as follows:
It was the first book to recognise (a) that design was
not something picked up by experience but was a
formal procedure with its own rules which could not
only be learnt by students but could be taught in a
rigorous manner and (b) that the chemical engineer
needed to know about a whole range of techniques
outside the narrow ever more scientific approach of
chemical engineering science. Here is a book that
truly reflects the practice of the profession in industry
far more than any other published in the same time
period. Hence it is a very significant book and will
be seen as such in the future.

Not content with this one pioneering achievement,

Rudd was involved in the production of a second
significant contribution 5 years later. Process Synthesis
(Rudd, Powers & Siirola, 1973) appears to be the first
text entirely devoted to setting out a conceptual framework and to providing methods to help students to
develop flowsheets for new processes from scratch. The
motivation of the authors is made clear in the books
Preface:

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

Since World War II, engineering education has

moved strongly toward analysis, with courses dealing
with individual process operations and phenomena.
Transport Phenomena, Unit Operations, Process
Control (sic!), Reaction Engineering, and other engineering science courses greatly strengthened engineering education by showing how things are and how
they work. Unfortunately, there was not a parallel
development of courses dealing with synthesis
This deficiency has been recognised for years, but the
remedy awaited the development of sufficiently general principles of synthesis about which to organise
educational material.

Process Synthesis has been used to good effect in

undergraduate teaching of process design, but its aim to
tackle the issues of synthesis using a combination of
qualitative methods and rudimentary analysis to guide
decision making prompted the exploration of alternative pedagogical approaches.
The development of methods based on pinch analysis
has led to two books suitable for undergraduate use.

287

The Users Guide on Process Integration for the Efficient

Use of Energy (Linnhoff et al., 1982) concentrates on
methods for the synthesis of heat exchanger networks.
Smith (1995) book combines discussion of methods
based on pinch analysis (e.g. for energy integration and
waste minimisation) with qualitative methods (e.g. for
reaction and separation system synthesis).
Douglas (1988) book presents a systematic method
for conceptual process design based on the use of
short-cut calculations within the framework of a depthfirst search to rapidly screen process alternatives and
come up with a viable process flowsheet. The book is
designed to form the basis for a one-semester, senior
level course in process design, and has been used for
that purpose in many departments with excellent results, as well as to train practising engineers in industry
to be more effective process designers.
More recently, two books have been published which
provide a more comprehensive coverage of design techniques (both synthesis and analysis) rather than seeking
to help students develop their skills in the application of
one particular approach. Biegler, Grossmann and Westerberg (1997) have assembled in their text the contents

Fig. 1. Solving engineering problems (from Rudd & Watson, 1968).

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J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

The contrast between the historical development of

teaching in process control, as evidenced by textbooks,
and that in process design, is a striking one. In both
cases, an appropriate balance between synthesis and
analysis is being sought. In control, an early emphasis
on analysis has been redressed to a greater or lesser
extent by subsequent texts, whereas the synthetic element was present in the very earliest systems-orientated
design texts.
The balance between synthesis and analysis in any
given course is a key issue, depending on many factors.
My personal view is that chemical engineering courses
should include a significant component of synthesis,
and that the process systems elements of the undergraduate curriculum are key in delivering that requirement.

3. Historical developments the systems approach

In parallel with developments aimed at helping students to learn methods, techniques and tools applicable
to particular classes of engineering problem, a strand of
process systems engineering teaching has evolved which
seeks to help students to develop a systems approach
to the general practice of their profession. One of the
early pioneers of this strand was Rippin (1969):

Fig. 2. A systems approach (taken from Rippin, 1969).

of a number of undergraduate and graduate level

courses developed and run at Carnegie-Mellon University since the late 1970s or 1980s. Seider, Seader and
Lewin (1999) present a comprehensive treatment of
synthesis and analysis techniques for the design of
continuous processes. This book includes an extensive
discussion of techniques for plant-wide controllability
assessment, and thus represents the first attempt in an
undergraduate text to unify process and control system
design.
One final point should be made on the pedagogical
materials supporting a process systems approach to
process design, there is very little on the design of batch
processes. Only Biegler et al. (1997) devote significant
amounts of space to this topic.
Of course, there have been many pedagogical contributions to what might be called enabling technologies
in process systems engineering, notably in mathematical
and computational techniques such as flowsheeting,
simulation and optimisation. This authors decision not
to include a review of developments in these key areas
should not be taken to imply that they are not important contributions to the development of process systems education!

David was opposed to general-purpose systems

techniques, advocating rather systems thinking (Sargent, personal communication 1999).

Fig. 2 is taken from Rippin (1969). It shows a

procedure for tackling complex engineering problems
using systems engineering methodologies and techniques. Thus, Systems Engineering, as perceived by
Rippin and others, is a general set of methodologies
and tools for solving engineering problems involving
complex systems (see also Jenkins, 1969, Jenkins was
one of David Rippins collaborators in the founding of
a new Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Lancaster in 1966).
Problem solving is a field of education which has
received a lot of attention from the academic community, particularly in engineering but also elsewhere.
Rather than review the large literature on this broad
topic, I will focus on two activities within our own
community.
The most comprehensive approach to the development of problem solving skills for undergraduate chemical engineers has been that developed at McMaster
University under the leadership of Donald Woods
(Woods et al., 1997). On the basis of a very careful
analysis of the undergraduate curriculum (involving,
among other things, one of the faculty enrolling as an
undergraduate and attending the entire 4-year pro-

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

Table 1
Problem solving course components at McMaster University (from
Woods et al., 1997)
(a)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

Awareness (14 h)
What is problem solving? (1 h)
Self-assessment (36 h)
Strategies (1.55 h)
I want to and I can, stress management (12 h)
Analysis, classification (24 h)
Creativity (68 h)
Introduction to visual thinking, translation (2 h)
Define the stated problem (2 h)
Getting unstuck (1 h)
Identifying personal preference and implications (2 h
workshop plus 3 h completing forms)
12
Learning skills (2 h workshop plus 1 h taking notes)
13
Analysis, consistency (13 h)
14
Creating the look back and extending experiences (24
h)
15
Exploring the situation to identify the real problem
(24 h)
16
Tactics (23 h)
17
Time management for individuals (24 h)
18
Evaluation and stress management (12 h)
19
More on visual thinking, reading P&IDs (25 h)
20
Asking questions (48 h)
21
Analysis, sequences and series (24 h)
22
Broadening perspectives (14 h)
23
Obtaining criteria (2 h)
24
Decision making (24 h)
2324a Criteria and decision making in the context of career
counselling and guidance
25
Time management for groups and projects (2 h)
26
Listening and responding
(a)
Attending and following (1 h)
(b)
Body language (1 h)
(c)
Reflecting (1 h)
27
Group skills and 28. Group evaluation (90 min4 h)
(b)
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
38a
39
39a
40

Being an effective chairperson (15 h)*

Analysis, reasoning and drawing conclusions (57 h)
Defining real problems (1.54 h)
Implementing (24 h)
Coping with ambiguity (1015 h)*
Trouble shooting (810 h)*
Heuristics or rules-of thumb for problem solving (35
h)
Self-directed learning or problem-based learning (1.53
h)*
Simplifying and generalising (24 h)
Consolidating the knowledge structure
Consolidating the knowledge structure in chemical
engineering (68 h)
Creating tacit information or experience knowledge
Creating tacit information or experience knowledge in
chemical engineering (24 h)
Successive approximation and optimum sloppiness (24
h)*

Other units
41
Finding opportunities (12 h)
42
Procrastination and other attitudes (24 h)
43
Giving and receiving feedback (13 h)
44
Assertiveness (24 h)
45
Coping creatively with conflict (90 min3 h)

289

Table 1 (Continued)
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57

Coping with difficult behaviours (25 h)

Accentuating the negative (13 h)
Communication (30 h)
Coping with change (15 h)
Being a change agent (3 h)
Managing change (3 h)
Fundamentals of interpersonal skills (15 h)
Effective teams and team building (18 h)
Goals, mission and vision (46 h)
Roles and responsibilities in teams (23 h)
Networking, how to enrich your life and get things
done (124 h)
Convincing others, getting a buy-in (35 h)

Core units for course chemical engineering 2G2, development of

individual skill in solving reasonably well-defined problems (48 h
available with selection from the following units depending on the
needs of the students. The usual selections are indicated with a .
Chemical engineering 3E4, development of individual skill in solving
vaguely-defined, chemical engineering problems (18 h available for
the synthesis and application of skills developed in Chemical Engineering 2G2). Core units for course Chemical Engineering 3G3,
development of interpersonal skills, lifelong learning and team problem solving skills for open-ended, systems and people problems (24 h
available with selection from the following units depending on the
needs of the students. The usual selections are indicated with a .
Core units for course chemical engineering 4N4, development of
interpersonal skills, lifelong learning and team problem solving skills
for ill-defined and open-ended technical and interpersonal problems
(3050 h available with selection from the following units depending
on the needs of the students. The * indicates the usual topics with the
total hour dependent on the degree to which the activities combine
knowledge with MPS skill acquisition. For example, for MPS unit 29,
1 h is devoted to understanding the target skill and the feedback
forms; the 14 h is spent in meetings that each person chairs. The
meeting can be used to learn the subject knowledge.

gramme!), an extensive set of courses has been developed (see Table 1a and b). One hundred twenty contact
hours are available in the undergraduate course in
chemical engineering at McMaster to deliver a selection
of this material (Woods states that 200 contact h would
be required to deliver the entire set of courses).
The goals of the McMaster programme are very
comprehensive, and clearly go beyond the scope of even
a broad definition of process systems engineering education. Nevertheless, significant parts of the course are
highly relevant to the development of a systems approach, particularly some of those in the third and
fourth year courses (courses 3G3, 4N4). The programme takes a bottom-up approach to the development of problem solving skills. The early courses are
concerned with individual students working on comparatively well-defined problems. More open-ended problems are tackled in later years, where the nature of the
problems often implies a team-based approach.
Higgins, Maitland, Perkins, Richardson and Warren
Piper (1989), in describing a course on engineering
problem solving offered to first-year undergraduates in
chemical engineering at Imperial College, identify three

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

290

generic types of problem which engineers are called upon

to solve,
problems of prediction (e.g. what is the time T taken
for a train moving at a steady speed S to travel
between stations A and B which are at a distance D
apart?);
problems of explanation (why are all numbers of the
form abcabc (e.g. 791791) divisible by 7, 11 and 13?);
problems of invention (devise a method for ensuring
that flying aircraft always keep a safe distance from
each other).
The course focuses on the third type. In a 2-week
workshop involving roughly 25 contact h, students are
helped to develop and apply a systematic approach to
tackling problems of invention. The stated objectives of
the course are that,
students adopt a convention for stating problems
which leads to a systematic way of writing design
briefs;
students creativeness is tapped and manifests itself in
a confidence in producing a diversity of solutions to
a problem and in avoiding common pitfalls in problem-solving;
students can evaluate potential solutions against their
brief;
solutions are presented in an effective way;
students become more effective members of design
teams.
A simple model of problem-solving is presented,
consisting of six stages defining the problem; conceiving possible solutions; evaluating solutions and choosing
one of them; producing the chosen solution; presenting
the chosen solution; and evaluating the pro-cess of
problem-solving. (There are resonances here with the text
of Rudd and Watson discussed in the previous section.
Incidentally, it is also interesting to note that Donald
Woods was one of the people mentioned by those authors
as using their text in its 6arious stages of de6elopment in
the uni6ersity classroom (Rudd & Watson, 1968)). Students are introduced to the components of the framework
and then apply it to realistic engineering problems (e.g.
developing proposals for the reduction in the energy

usage of a given plant) during the course of the workshop.

4. The current position
In this section, information on the present content of
the undergraduate course at Imperial College will be
presented, as an illustration of current practice (at least
in one department with which the author is familiar) in
process systems teaching.
The undergraduate programme at Imperial College
extends over 4 years, leading to the degree of Master of
Engineering (M. Eng.). A high-quality intake of around
80 students enters the first year each year, to be taught
by a faculty consisting of just over 30 people (of whom
eight are involved in process systems teaching and
research).
In the first 3 years of the course, the students working
day is divided into two, with lectures and tutorials
confined to one half of the day (typically the mornings).
Project work occupies the other half-day. There are no
class activities on Wednesday afternoons, to allow students to participate in sports. Thus, in a 4-week project,
students are expected to undertake roughly 50 h of work
(In practice, they often spend far more time than this!)
The first term of the final (fourth) year shows a similar
pattern, but in the second term of 11 weeks the students
spend most of their time on the final design project.
Information on the current core and elective systems
courses is shown in Table 2. In assessing the proportion
of the total course devoted to systems-related activities,
it is worthwhile to note that the first 3 years of the course
include 220235 lectures. The final year contains about
120. Project work runs for between 15 and 20 of the
weeks in the first 3 years. On that basis, lecture courses
in systems topics contribute roughly 10% of the overall
lecture programme, and systems-related projects roughly
40% of the total project load. A student interested
enough to take up all elective slots with systems topics
would pursue a programme with about 20% systems
lectures and approaching 50% systems projects, the
elective courses having project work associated with
them.

Table 2
Systems components of the current undergraduate programme at Imperial College, London
Year of study

Lectures

Projects

First year

Process analysis, 24, lectures text, Felder and Rousseau (1986)

Second year

Process dynamics and control, 30 lectures text, Stephanopoulos (1984)

Third year

Strategy of design, 20 lectures text, Douglas (1988). Elective, Dynamic Behaviour of

Process Systems, 40 lectures plus 20 h project work
Electives, Advanced Process Synthesis; Advanced Process Control; Stochastic and
Adaptive Systems; Flexible Process Operations, all 40 lectures plus 20 h project work

Design, 2 weeks; pilot plant, 3

weeks
Process control, 4 weeks; pilot
plant, 3 weeks
Synthesis/flowsheeting, 4 weeks

Fourth year

Design, 11 weeks (full-time)

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

291

Table 3
Educational objectives of core lecture courses at Imperial College
Course and year

Process Analysis, year 1

Process Dynamics and

Control, year 2

Strategy of Process Design,

year 3

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to
Quantitatively describe the behaviour of steady-state flow systems in terms of pressures, temperatures, flow
rates and compositions
Perform steady-state mass balances on an entire process in order to calculate flow rates and compositions
within that process system which may include chemical reaction(s), simple separation(s), purge stream(s),
recycle(s), and similar complications
Perform steady-state energy balances as above, given certain thermodynamic simplifications
Assess the economic potential and possible environmental impact of processes, given suitable data
Organise themselves into groups which, when faced with a complex problem, can plan a strategy for its
efficient solution
Derive mathematical models describing the transient behaviour of simple lumped systems in the time domain
Derive linearised models from the above mathematical models and use them to deduce the important
qualitative features of the transient process behaviour
Describe the need for, and the fundamental objectives of, process control for specific applications
Describe the relative benefits and limitations of feedback and feedforward control schemes
Select and tune simple and cascaded feedback controllers suitable for a variety of common applications
Devise and tune simple feedforward control schemes used either in isolation or in conjunction with feedback
control
Select appropriate control structures for unit operations involving several potential measurements and control
manipulations
Develop process designs using the Douglas methodology
Use computer-based flowsheeting tools as calculational aids in process design problems
Apply pinch analysis techniques to the solution of heat exchanger network problems

More details on the core lecture courses are given in

Table 3 in the form of the declared educational objectives of each course. Details of the objectives of the
design project in first year have been discussed in the
previous section. The second and third year design
projects are based on open-ended exercises designed to
enable students (working in groups) to develop through
practice and display the skills involved in the more
synthetic elements of the corresponding lecture courses.
In second year, the students work on a simulated
industrial furnace devising and implementing a process
control system. The third year project is based on
applying the Douglas method to an example. Students
in groups of four go through all stages of the method;
flowsheeting tools are available for use at the students
discretion. The aim of these projects is to prepare
students to tackle the final design project in fourth year.
There, the students work in larger groups to produce a
comprehensive process design involving process synthesis, design of key units, safety and layout, environmental impact, operation and control, and economics.
In addition to the design projects in each year of the
4-year programme, students gain practical experience of
process control and operation through two pilot-plant
projects, one in each of first and second years. The
details of these projects have been described elsewhere
(Macchietto & Kershenbaum, 1987).
A development in the last decade in the UK has been
the introduction of 1-year taught Masters programmes,

typically leading to an M.Sc. degree and involving

formal lecture-based material combined with a substantial dissertation. An M.Sc. in Process Systems Engineering was introduced at Imperial College in 1996. Five
modules, each consisting of 40 lectures and 20 h of
project work, constitute the formal part of the course.
The current modules are, Dynamic Behaviour of Process Systems; Advanced Process Synthesis; Advanced
Process Control; Stochastic and Adaptive Systems; and
Flexible Process Operations. These modules also form
the elective systems courses offered to undergraduates.

5. The future
The development of the curriculum in chemical engineering has benefited in the past from the tension
between, on the one hand, imparting to the students a
good understanding of the sciences underpinning our
discipline and, on the other, the perceived need to help
aspiring engineers to develop and enhance the skills
necessary to practice as an effective professional. It is
my view that a balance between educational activities
designed to achieve each of these goals will continue to
be an important feature of our discipline if it is to
retain its uniqueness.
We have seen that addressing the educational objectives associated with the more synthetic aspects of
engineering practice was a goal of educators in process

292

J. Perkins / Computers and Chemical Engineering 26 (2002) 283293

systems engineering from the earliest days. It is my

hope that our community will continue to wrestle with
the challenges of helping students to become more
effective engineering problem solvers by developing
even better courses on the techniques of process systems
engineering and their application. In doing so, we
should recognise that the opportunities for chemical
engineers to apply their knowledge and skills have
broadened from the traditional arena of petrochemicals
to a whole range of industries where chemical and
biochemical transformations are the means to wealth
creation. The implication for courses in process systems
engineering is that they should seek to be broad in
application, emphasising the general rather than the
specific wherever possible. The development of courses
for chemical engineers in the area of product design
(Moggridge & Cussler, 1999; Westerberg & Subrahmanian, 2000) represents one exciting opportunity to
broaden the concerns of process systems engineering
education in response to these trends.
Another area where more pedagogical material could
usefully be produced is that of process modelling. The
development of appropriate mathematical models of
process systems is a synthetic activity. Indeed, many
characterise it as an art, in the same way as process
design has been characterised in the past. There are
current efforts (e.g. at the University of Queensland in
Australia (Cameron, 2000)) to develop courses specifically designed to help students to attack the problem of
developing an appropriate mathematical model of a
process system in a systematic way. The eventual publication of educational materials based on these prototype courses and the widespread introduction of such
courses into the core undergraduate curriculum would
be a very useful step in terms of developing graduate
chemical engineers who will fit for purpose in the new
millennium.
As well as educating our students in systems techniques and tools, we are excellently placed to address
the more general educational objectives associated with
what I have called in this paper the systems approach.
Indeed, many of you will feel that it is unhelpful to
make this division; our goal should be to educate
effective professionals who are able to take a systematic
approach involving systems thinking, techniques and
tools. If reading this paper has encouraged you in that
view, then my main objective has been achieved!

6. Conclusions
In this paper, I have presented a personal view of the
development of process systems engineering education.
The development of process design and control teaching has been presented through an analysis of some of
the key textbooks that have been published in the past

40 or more years. We have seen that a synthetic element

was present even in the earliest systems-orientated process design texts, whereas the most popular early process control texts took a strongly analytical approach.
Fortunately, this situation has been recovered to some
extent in the past 15 years, and more modern control
texts include synthetic material to a greater or lesser
extent, offering an instructor discretion in the balance
of the course he or she chooses to deliver. Using
quotations from some of these texts, I have tried to
show that these authors, and others in our community,
were concerned with more than the education of students in the use of systems techniques and tools. They
also embraced the synthetic nature of chemical engineering, and sought to help students acquire the skills
needed to tackle open-ended engineering problems. Indeed, it is probable that these concerns provided one of
the motivations for early research in process systems
engineering.
I have relied on a description of the course at Imperial College to characterise the current situation. It is
unlikely that there is such a thing as a typical chemical
engineering course these days. The discipline shows a
healthy diversity in curriculum adopted in different
departments, which in my view should be further encouraged. Nevertheless, it is hoped that a description of
how one department currently approaches this area in
its undergraduate course will be of interest.
For the future, in my view it will be important for us
to retain and indeed to strengthen the commitment of
the pioneers of process systems education to helping
our students to develop a systems approach. Not only
should we continue to enhance our students education
in systems tools and techniques (such as modelling
where more systematic courses are on the way). We
could also usefully strengthen our courses by contributing to the development of systems thinking or the
systems approach in our students. It is the combination of a strong and broad base in engineering science
and the ability to synthesise as well as analyse complex
systems that is the unique feature of chemical engineering. The process systems engineering community is the
natural keeper of the synthetic component of chemical
engineering education. I hope that we will continue to
recognise and embrace this responsibility as we develop
courses suitable for the chemical engineers of the
future.

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