So right now, you’re probably really in the midst of deciding what specialisation you are going to choose, and if you’re still reading my posts I assume maybe Chemmat is up there in your top options?? (No hard feelings if it’s not… no seriously… it’s fine 🙃)
Early in the year, I made a post that covered what we study in semester one, so here is the second instalment to that series: Sem 2 Sum Up!
CHEMMAT 202: Process Engineering 2: Energy and Processing
A straight continuation of Chemmat 201, as we literally have the same lecturers too. Some of the main topics we have focused on so far are: All the Laws of Thermodynamics, all the types of processes (adiabatic, isothermal etc.) and all the cyclic processes. This is a very content-based course and its super easy to fall behind very fast, so try your best to avoid the huge downwards spiral that is somewhat inevitable (at some point anyway) for this course. ALSO highly recommend attending the tutorials – they took attendance and showed how the average test mark was actually greatly impacted by the number of tutorials you attended.
CHEMMAT 203: Process Engineering 3: Transfer Processes
If I had to sum up this course in one word, it would be pressure (in more ways that one). The first half of the course is focused on fluid statics and fluid dynamics, with wayyy too many derivations for my liking. Some of the key topics within this include: hydrostatic forces, Bernoulli’s Principle, dimensional analysis and turbo-machines. This is a pretty interesting course, and there are also two labs sessions where you apply what you have learnt so you can physically see it, which is always cool too.
CHEMMAT 205: Process Design
(I warned you this semester is Too Much to Process). This course is THE fundamental of chemical/process engineering. The first part includes a lot of drawing and understanding process diagrams and plant safety. Also in the first lecture, we were introduced to the group project that we have the whole 12 weeks to complete. A big part of this course is also Mechanics of Materials – so yes you really need your ENGGEN 121 knowledge for this one, as we are currently learning torsion of circular shafts and stress analysis. There are also weekly quizzes for this one, so you’re forced to keep up whether you like it or not.
Also as a follow up to my last post, I asked a couple of my fellow part 2 chemmat’ers about why they chose Chemmat (and if they regret it yet 🤗)
Denise: “I chose CHEMMAT because it was what I enjoyed most out of first year!
What I enjoy most this year, is that we learn engineering processes with chemistry integrated into it. We also don’t only learn ‘maths’ but we learn things about management and how different factories work, so we can have a broad range of skills, that we can develop on throughout our degree!!”
Debra: “I initially chose chemmat because compared to all the other subjects it was the one that I did the best in. However, the concrete reason I chose to do it was because after researching, there are actually so many different end careers you could have with a chemmat degree.
What I enjoy about chemmat is the wide variety of things that we are actually learning, from system processing to material analysis. As well as we are doing a lot of group work that allows us to understand what working in the chemmat field would be like in the future.”