<p>It's a Physics course. How much relevance does it have to Chemical Engineering?</p>
<p>Thermodynamics is extremely relevant to chemical engineering. Heat transfer, kinetics, mixing, etc all involve thermo.</p>
<p>We take a year-long upper-division series in thermodynamics specifically tailored for problems in chemical engineering. Far more in depth that mechanical engineers and with more emphasis on chemical reactions. My question would be… why would you take this physic course in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics? If you get credit for it as part of the Physical Chemistry series I would say, go for it.</p>
<p>The statistical techniques you will learn in that course will prove useful in the future. I believe you will be introduced to Monte Carlo method in that course?</p>
<p>These are the topics from the course description: temperature and entropy, and the three laws of thermodynamics. Applications to ideal and real gases. Basic elements of statistical mechanics, including the canonical ensemble, partition function, equipartition theorem and Maxwell velocity distribution. Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac Statistic.</p>
<p>As for me I’m a Chem major/Math minor thinking about going to grad school for Chem Eng. There is no Engineering school at my college so I’ve trying to take relevant courses to make the transition easier. But I think CalPolyEngineer is right… I believe I can take undergrad eng courses I missed out at the grad school to make up anyway</p>
<p>Stat Mech was somewhat relevant to ChemE (everyone at my school is required to take Stat Mech, regardless of major). We covered a much more theoretical side of the thermodynamics we learned in our ChemE classes, and I thought the class kind of bridged the gap between ChemE thermo and some aspects of physical chemistry. </p>
<p>If you’re planning to do any modeling of complex molecular systems later on, it would probably be a good a course to have taken.</p>
<p>If I were designing a physics curriculum, I would do it exactly opposite to how it is usually covered. I would start with atomic physics and quantum mechanics- which follows naturally from the chemistry courses everyone has previously had to take. Then I would go on to Statistical Mechanics, which describes how the behavior of all the individual particles aggregates to result in the more readily observable phemomenon. Having now been derived from first principles, would I go on to the various applications of pre-20th century physics, Newton’s laws, etc.</p>
<p>I guess they don’t do it this way because of historical tradition, and because engineers need the more practical stuff right away in their sequence. I can’t argue with that, but I find it intellectually less satisfying; the various principles seem to be presented in a disjointed manner, as if each is itself comes out of the ether. Most engineers don’t proceed past quantum mechanics, hence may never see the connection.</p>
<p>So: is it “relevant” to chemical engineering?
“Macro” thermodynamics is clearly relevant, but will be covered extensively, in the form needed, in the chemical engineering curriculum.</p>
<p>Statistical mechanics is “relevant” at least as background to a greater intellectual understanding and satisfaction with the principles that will be commonly employed in engineeeering education & practice. Beyond background though, I don’t know. If it was needed they would be teaching it in Chem E. One thing it does though, it helps understand phase transitions which are important in Chem E I would think.</p>
<p><strong>Disclosure: not a chem E; physics major +EE. I did take a Statistical Thermodynamics course, many moons ago. It was very interesting, unfortunately I did very poorly in it.</strong></p>
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<p>There’s actually some pretty cool things you can do with thermo, such as deriving the length scale at which statistical mechanics takes over (and even getting some of the distributions used in it). You can also get at a lot of transport phenomenon through thermo without the use of Fick’s equations.</p>
<p>Also, to the person asking about Monte Carlo, you’d only get that in a modeling class. I don’t think it would pop up in a typical stat mech course.</p>