Courses in Chemical Engineering and Beyond

The Department of Chemical Engineering at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) hosts three programs at the time of writing: Paper Engineering, Bioprocess Engineering, and Chemical Engineering. Each program is an ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredited program in engineering, with a chemical engineering-based foundation. 

 

During my time as a Visiting Instructor at SUNY-ESF, I taught a number of courses involved in the Chemical Engineering and Paper Engineering programs. These courses include the following: 

• FCH 150: General Chemistry I 

• PSE 465/665: Fiber and Paper Properties

• ECH 355: Engineering Design Economics

• ECH 202/PSE 570: Principles of Mass and Energy Balances

• PSE 462/662: Papermaking Processes I

• PSE 478/678: Papermaking Processes II

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Each of these courses are required within the Paper Engineering Curriculum, while FCH 150, ECH 202, and ECH 355 are required within the Bioprocess Engineering and Chemical Engineering curriculums. The following is a summary of each course, with additional information and reflections below. 

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FCH 150: General Chemistry I

The General Chemistry I course at SUNY-ESF consisted of nearly 300 students split between two main lectures of approximately 150 students during the Fall 2023 semester in which I taught the course. This was a required course for many majors, and had a mixture of students with different demographic backgrounds. Many students had never studied chemistry before, while others had prior chemistry courses in high school, and there was a mixture of traditional and non-traditional students in the course. This presented an interesting challenge of balancing course content, pace, and difficulty to keep everyone engaged and learning. Additionally, the large cohort of students required the support and direction of two graduate Teaching Assistants and a handful of undergraduate Teaching Assistants and graduate Laboratory Teaching Assistants to aid in grading, office hours, recitation sessions, and study sessions. Regarding content, this was a typical first-semester college chemistry course that covered many topics, including (but not limited to) basic dimensional analysis, the periodic table, atoms and molecules, balancing chemical reactions, stoichiometry, energy and wavelengths, and the Ideal Gas Law. 

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PSE 465/665: Fiber and Paper Properties

Fiber and Paper Properties is an upper division course in the undergraduate Paper Engineering program that is also cross-listed with the graduate Paper Engineering program. The student cohort in the Fall 2023 semester in which I taught the course consisted of four undergraduate and two graduate students. This course is a core requirement in the Paper Engineering programs, and teaches students about fundamental information and technical skills about papermaking fibers and paper itself. Graduate students also researched an additional topic of their interest and presented this topic to the undergraduate students to expand their knowledge of paper properties. The challenge of this course was the balance and organization of course content, laboratory work, and expectations of workload regarding assessments. The content in the course focused on fiber properties, the processing of fiber, the influence of fiber and furnish on paper properties, the fundamentals of structural, mechanical, and optical paper properties, and the testing of these properties of different grades of paper in the laboratory. 

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ECH 355: Engineering Design Economics

Engineering Design Economics is an upper division course required across the three major engineering programs in the Department of Chemical engineering. Throughout the two semesters of working on this course (Spring 2024 and Spring 2025), there was a good mixture of Paper Engineering, Bioprocess Engineering, and Chemical Engineering students. The Spring 2024 semester consisted of eight students, with the Spring 2025 semester consisting of eighteen students. The challenges of this course involved project/assessment design and relevancy of course content regarding alignment of this course to future design courses. This course was re-modeled with the knowledge that most students in the engineering programs take ECH 355 prior to their senior-level design courses in their respective fields. As such, this was a blend of General Design Considerations and Design Economics. General Design Considerations were topics such as plant location, plant layout, instrumentation, and EHS (Environmental, Health, and Safety). Design Economics included the calculation of capital investment, revenue, operating costs, gross profit, depreciation, income tax, and cash flows for projects, as well as profitability measures such as breakeven point, return on investment, and net present value. Students worked with economic analysis of projects to choose between project alternatives, and incorporated general design considerations in the selection of their final plant or process. 

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ECH 202/PSE 560: Principles of Mass and Energy Balances

The Principles of Mass and Energy Balances course is a requirement for the Department of Chemical Engineering undergraduate programs, as well as some graduate programs. Students from other departments - such as Environmental Science - may also take this course as part of their studies. This is one of the first courses in which students are introduced to engineering concepts. As such, a challenge with this course was to balance material, pace, and resources available to close knowledge gaps within the student body. This was also previously designed in a "flipped classroom" format in which the lecture material was posted as videos and required readings, while class time was spent with active problem solving. Approximately 25 students took this course during the Fall 2024 semester, including one graduate student. The graduate student performed a mass and energy balance around a pilot paper machine as their course project in correlation with PSE 462/662 - Papermaking Processes I. The topics in ECH 202 included Ideal Gas Law, dimensional analysis, chemical reactions, mass balances around systems and subsystems, humidity and vapor pressure relationships, enthalpy and energy balances around systems and subsystems, and mass and energy balances around reactive and non-reactive processes.

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PSE 462/662 and PSE 478/678: Papermaking Processes I and II

The Papermaking Processes I and II courses are a pair of the penultimate courses in the undergraduate and graduate Paper Engineering programs. These courses - split between the Fall (PSE 462/662) and Spring (PSE 478/678) semesters involve the design of paper grades from the laboratory to semi-commercial scale to fulfill the needs of a particular client. During the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters, four undergraduate and two graduate students participated in the course. The challenge of this course was the balance of expectations for student knowledge and skills entering the course with the reality of their incoming abilities, and how to best support and reinforce prior skills for successful participation in the course. Additionally, encouraging communication and teamwork within the student cohort was challenging. In Papermaking Processes I, students focused on translating customer needs for their paper product into specifications, researching these specifications to create preliminary grade characteristics, performing laboratory handsheet studies on their paper furnishes for each grade, and completing pilot-scale paper machine runs to test the effect of machine parameters on their paper grades for scale-up to a semi-commercial production run. Papermaking Processes II focused on final revisions to the paper grades developed in Papermaking Processes I and the operation of the semi-commercial paper machine to produce over 500 pounds of paper for their clients. During the Fall 2024 semester, students worked with the Landscape Architecture Department at SUNY-ESF to develop two grades - a chipboard for modeling projects and a draft (drawing) grade. Additionally, the students worked with the Print Media and Graphic Arts program at Syracuse University to develop an art grade that could be utilized for embossing, screen printing, and other printing styles. In the Spring 2025 semester, students took two grades to their semi-commercial production runs - the chipboard and art grades.