Teaching chemical product design to engineering students: course contents and challenges

The master course Chemical and Biochemical Product Design has been taught at DTU for the past 10 years. The course covers the main phases of product design from mapping of customer needs, over idea generation and selection, to production of the product. The primary aim of the course is to provide the students with a quantitative approach that enables them to analyse products and ideas using fundamental scientific disciplines from the engineering curriculum. The course is comprised of four team projects of which the last one is dedicated to the student teams own identified needs. Examples of needs that students have worked on are solvent free nail polish, new ways to anti-icing on cars, slow-melting ice cream, and coffee tablets for instant coffee

ZnO as a cheap and effective filler for high breakdown strength elastomers

Cheap, high-performance dielectric elastomers are in high demand from industry concerning new products based on dielectric elastomer transducers. However, formulating an elastomer that fulfils all the requirements for dielectric elastomers is difficult and, first and foremost, not cheap. In this article, we explore the use of a cheap and abundant metal oxide filler, namely ZnO, as a filler in silicone-based dielectric elastomers. The electro-mechanical properties of the elastomer composites are investigated, and their performance is evaluated by means of figures of merit. Various commercial silicone elastomers and a self-formulated silicone elastomer are utilised as elastomer matrices, the effects of which on the final properties of the elastomer composite are investigate