Chemical Engineering including an Industrial Year MEng

In this module, you’ll undertake a combined design and research project in a team of two to four students. In addition, you’ll gain detailed knowledge in the specific topic of study.

The aim is for you to gain skills in planning, executing and reporting on an individual research study thereby developing their powers of analysis, independence and critical judgement. You’ll spend one hour in tutorials and make use of group-study sessions each week studying for this module.

In this module, you’ll be familiarised with our complex food systems and their formulation and performance. You’ll gain an understanding of a range of food process engineering technologies, enabling you to design process methodologies and comprehend current problems and their potential solutions. This includes:

• an introduction to food materials (including physicochemical, structural, nutritional and functional characteristics) and their complex nature
• food safety within a food processing environment, from factory design to finished product packaging at scale
• comprehensive understanding of current unit operations used in food manufacturing
• common current processes, including thermal and non-thermal, freezing, dehydration, separation, fermentation and packaging considerations
• the link between processing conditions
• AI and material properties
• environmental and sustainability issues

In this module, you’ll look at the potential of various waste streams in industry, domestic sources and agriculture, as well as the different combustion technologies available. The module will include a strong international focus, particularly on small to medium scale renewable energy schemes in developing countries. The module also has dedicated socio-cultural, socio-economic, policy and guidance and techno-economic seminars to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject.

Topics include:

• indigenous fuels around the world
• fuel types
• characterisation of fuels
• supply chains for the energy sector
• small scale energy production
• alternative small-scale technologies for fuels production -
• future energy sources
• new technologies
• ethics, engineering and waste management
• life cycle assessment, CCaLC 

This module aims to provide you with the fundamental knowledge of energy storage science and the practical skills related to this area. It covers the following topics:

• fuels storage (coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydrogen etc)
• mechanical energy storage (springs, compressed air, fly wheels etc)
• heat or thermal energy storage (phase transformation, endothermic and exothermic reactions etc)
• electricity storage (electrochemical means, such as batteries, fuel cells, redox flow batteries, supercapacitors)
• integration of storage with supplier and users (power electronics for interfacing energy stores with power grid, renewable sources and users)

You'll spend two hours in lectures and three hours in practicals per week.

This module will introduce you to the flow properties of complex fluids. You will cover rheological models, outline characterisation techniques and explore selected applications. 

This module aims to help you master advanced concepts in chemical reaction engineering. You’ll study advanced topics in reactor design, including mixing, reacting solids and the interactions of kinetics with mass and heat transfer and their effects on design.

This module will extend your knowledge of more complex issues in fluid flow and heat transfer where the fluids are a combination of gas and liquid. The module will identify the industrial occurrence of the simultaneous flow of more than one phase and highlight the implications for design. It will establish the principles of flow and heat transfer in gas/liquid systems and the principles of design methods. 

This module is designed to give you experience of developing numerical models and to code them for solving practical chemical engineering problems, with potential application to research projects. Topics include:

• an introduction to Matlab programming
• writing code for modelling engineering systems
• script files, arrays, loops, if statements, functions, plotting
• application to Finite Difference and Monte Carlo modelling methods

You’ll be taught to develop numerical models for solving real chemical and environmental engineering problems such as flow and transport. 

This module aims to provide you with a view of current world practice in the location and extraction of oil and gas. You’ll cover aspects of:

• the formation and location of petroleum hydrocarbon reserves
• drilling and completion engineering including well control techniques
• basic reservoir physics and evaluation
• production management and enhancement
• primary separation

This module covers the design of processes and equipment that make use of biological entities for the synthesis of chemicals and materials.

You’ll apply chemical engineering principles to processes involving biological systems and appraise the significant issues of reactor engineering, product recovery, isolation and purification specific to biotechnology. You’ll also apply problem solving skills to design bioprocessing unit operations. 

This module will explore decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Risks of particular interest are those associated with large engineering projects such as the development of innovative new products and processes. The module will present and interpret some of the frameworks that are helpful for balancing risks and benefits in situations that typically involve human safety, potential environmental effects and large financial and technological uncertainties. You will use case studies to illustrate key points and these will centre around the use and recovery of plastics, metals, industrial minerals and energy.