Advanced Chemical Engineering Professional Skills - Do We Teach Them Effectively?

Chemical engineering professional skills are essential in ensuring that the graduates are able to effectively face not only the current, but also future societal and technological challenges. Whilst the core chemical engineering knowledge in unit operations, such as reaction engineering and separations, remains a defining feature and a fundamental requirement of various accreditation criteria of the chemical engineering courses, it is clear that this in itself is not sufficient to provide the future generations of chemical engineers with the knowledge and skills to address the challenges they will face in their future professional careers. An important part of this skill set is the ability to deal with uncertainty, to innovate, to represent a conceptual model of a process or a unit operation in such a way that it allows the user to explore the response of the process / unit operation to dynamic disturbances and to optimise the performance of the given process / unit operation. At Newcastle University this forms the basis of the advanced design task presented in this contribution. Following a brief international review of the importance of core chemical engineering knowledge and skills (gathered by the authors during the recent EU sponsored iTeach project), the learning outcomes and the structure of the revised advanced design module will be presented. The emphasis will be placed on the assessment of critical professional skills as outlined above, indicating various approaches taken to ensure a broad professional skill set development

Selective Partial Reduction of Nitroarenes to the Hydrazoarene Catalyzed by Amine‐Modified Ordered Mesoporous Silica Immobilized Ionic Liquid (OMSIIL) Stabilised RuNPs

Ruthenium nanoparticles stabilised by an amine-modified Ordered Mesoporous Silica Immobilized Ionic Liquid (OMSIIL) are efficient catalysts for the partial reduction of nitrobenzene to hydrazobenzene with 100 % selectivity as well as the complete reduction to aniline. High selectivity for the partial reduction of nitrobenzene to hydrazobenzene was obtained when the reaction was conducted in ethanol with 0.5 mol% catalyst and NaBH₄ as the hydrogen donor whereas aniline was obtained as the sole product in water when dimethylamine borane (DMAB) was used as the hydrogen donor. Interestingly, while a range of electron poor nitroarenes were reduced to the corresponding hydrazoarene with high selectivities and good conversions, nitroarenes substituted with electron donating groups resulted in complete reduction to the aniline. Composition-time profiles suggest that reductions conducted in ethanol with sodium borohydride occur via the condensation pathway while those conducted in water using dimethylamine borane as the hydrogen source may well go via the direct pathway. This is the first example of the selective reduction of nitrobenzene to hydrazobenzene using a ruthenium nanoparticle-based catalyst and the initial TOF of 320 mol nitrobenzene converted mol Ru⁻¹ h⁻¹ for the partial reduction of nitrobenzene to hydrazobenzene is markedly higher than previous literature reports. A study of the catalyst performance as a function of the surface modification revealed that each component has a direct and dramatic effect on the efficacy as RuNPs stabilised by COK-12 modified with imidazolium-based ionic liquid and a primary amine gave the highest conversion while selective removal of either component or replacement of the primary amine with a tertiary amine resulted in a marked reduction in efficiency