開課單位：化工系
課程簡介：Aspen Plus covers almost everything in Chemical Engineering, but the student exposure to this software is minimal. Moreover, students also lack in the understanding of polymers in chemical engineering. In this course, we would like to develop a new MOOC for online access on Aspen Plus and unit operations references for polymer processes.
課程設計：The purpose of this MOOC is to introduce the student to the use of Aspen Plus in polymers technology; consequently, very few of the process simulation capabilities are considered here. In undergraduate chemical engineering degree programs, process simulation is heavily used in the capstone design course, and this is where its details and intricacies are generally taught. This course serves as a prelude to instruction in the more complex process simulation and provides a coherent approach to introducing the Aspen Plus simulator in undergraduate and graduate polymers technology courses. We hope it will make such courses more interesting and relevant by allowing calculations of real processes that would otherwise be very tedious. One advantage of doing such calculations by computer is that repetitive calculations with varying parameters are quickly achieved, so that the student gains experience into the ways in which different input parameters affect the output. Such calculations develop engineering insight. Any instructor knows that asking students to do repetitive calculations by hand is met by moans and groans. Doing a calculation for one case is an important learning activity, while doing many cases by hand has much less pedagogical return for the student’s time investment.
This MOOC provides the students with a self-study, step-by-step guide to doing polymers technology in Aspen Plus. Aspen Polymers can optimize production rates, yield and quality by modeling polymerization processes using proven, market-leading process simulation technology. Aspen Polymers has complete set of polymer reaction models which use flexible built-in reaction kinetic models for step-growth condensation, free radical (bulk/solutions), emulsion, Ziegler-Natta/metallocene or ionic polymerization. Aspen Polymers is powered with premier polymer property models that use polymer-specific pure component, mixture and phase equilibrium models and built-in databases for segments, initiator and polymer components. With polymer property characterization, we can use patented methods to characterize polymer properties and molecular-weight distributions. We can also predict polymer composition, branching, tacticity, dyads and other molecular structural properties. Aspen Polymers can simulate different liquid phase and solid polymers where polymers (and oligomers) can be treated as solids below their melting points— allowing users to model the entire polymer process including drying and dewatering. One important feature is that learning occurs by means of illustration. It is not a course of rules but of specific examples, encouraging students to generalize from those examples and apply what they have observed to a specific problem.