Seames publishes second academic textbook
If you were a UND student in the Department of Chemical Engineering who completed your senior year after 2002, your capstone design courses were taught by Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor Wayne Seames (or by a substitute using his material).
He has now organized the contents of those materials into a textbook.
Titled Process Design, Economics, and Project Engineering, the book has been published by Routledge Books/CRC Press/Taylor & Francis this fall.
“When I was first given the opportunity to teach design while a graduate student in 1997, I sat down and figured out what I wished I had learned to support my industrial career, which involved projects of all sizes and types,” Seames explained. “Some of this information was covered well in existing textbooks, but there were significant gaps. Most significantly, none of the textbooks covered retrofit projects (a modification to an existing plant), which are much more common than grassroots (an entirely new plant) projects.”
The principal goal of this textbook is to prepare process/chemical engineers for careers in a wide variety of process-related jobs.
“Other design books do not differentiate between the different levels and types of design or explain what level of detail for design and economics is needed at each phase of the project.”
The book will also serve as a reference resource for engineers working in the process and process design industries. The book assumes prerequisite knowledge of material and energy balances, heat transfer, fluid flow, and mass transfer, but does not require any prerequisite knowledge of economics, process control, process safety, or material selection.
“Most of the rest of the information is available in other textbooks, but you’d need at least three to cover all of the other topics that are included in the new book.”
It is uniquely organized to follow the project life cycle that is most commonly used by engineering contractors and the operating companies they serve in the process industries. Covering both retrofit and new-process projects, the textbook includes a set of easy-to-use, step-by-step preliminary equipment-sizing methods and offers realistic rules of thumb for equipment sizing and pressure profiles.
“Senior chemical engineering students have been using the draft textbook for the past couple of years. They haven’t had to struggle quite as much as previous students who were working just off my slides and notes, plus other textbooks. I’m only sorry I didn’t get the book finished sooner.”
The textbook also includes professional development topics such as time management, planning and scheduling, teamwork, leadership, conflict resolution, technical writing, effective meetings, and oral communication.
Addressing safety and sustainability considerations in process design, Seames’s book includes a unified suite of cost estimating methods for simple retrofits, major retrofits, and grassroots projects, and covers process/project economics and evaluating process opportunities.
Conceptual design topics are also covered, including plant layout, auxiliary systems, and process automation. The automation section is a summary of Seames’ other textbook, Designing Controls for the Process Industries (also published by CRC Press), which is in its second edition.
Both textbooks are aimed at advanced undergraduate students in chemical engineering and as handbooks for practicing process, process control, and process project engineers.
