Kia Ora team!
Here’s hoping that CHEMMAT 121 isn’t putting you off considering this specialisation. I thought it would be good for you to have an insight into the classes in Part 2 CHEMMAT.
In semester one, we delve into the world of Process Engineering in CHEMMAT 201. A huge part of the degree is the chemical/process Engineering side (haha funny that), so this paper lays the foundations for the majority of the degree. In this paper, we learnt about material and energy balance for reactions and non-reactions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this paper as I love doing the long calculations, although one suggestion for the course is to definitely do the practice
problems so you get familiar with the question formats. Here, you’ll learn more about the block flow diagrams (recall from ENGGEN 140) and may explore real world examples like a methane plant and understanding the amount of energy going into the production of methane.
Moving on, we have CHEMMAT 204… this is a continuation of CHEMMAT 121, and yes, you’ll get the houuuuuuggeely famous Steve Matthews. This course goes deeper into the world of steel, fracture mechanics, as well as introduces materials analyses like X-ray diffraction and Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques. Hot tip: get used to the phase diagrams, they’ll be your best friend đź’”
Now, for those who loved chemistry in high school, you’ll finally get to experience it in CHEMMAT 206 – Applied Chemistry. This course begins with some of the foundations that you may or may not have seen before, such as organic chemistry, electrochemistry, as well as qualitative analyses including spectroscopy. Get used to writing lab reports as CHEMMAT is heavily lab dependent. One highlight would be the fascinating conduction polymer lab in which we grew a polymer through redox reactions, which can conduct electricity (pretty neat hey?). Don’t worry, these strange things all have uses, such as roofing tiles, solar panels and membranes.
That’s all for CHEMMAT specific now; everyone’s fave paper, ENGSCI 111s big sibling, 211, comes in to teach us more about multi-variate calculus and ODEs, as well as using the R platform to perform data analyses… yeah, we all loved it. Then a bit on matrices and linear algebra to really make your semester. It’s pain, but also compulsory so, suck it up, I guess ?
Another compulsory part of your degree is ENGGEN 299 – mechanical tools, where you get to build an e-motor to demonstrate that you can actually use these tools. You’ll start with 3D Printing your pieces, then soldering the circuits (Make sure you do all of it, they only give you the first part in the session if it’s the same as this year) then finally laser cutting the acrylic casing. It’s best to get onto it quickly as you don’t want to get to the end of the year and have it unfinished where every man and his dog are rushing to Newmarket to get it done. (I still haven’t got it done so don’t ask me about it!
Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed, semester one is really interesting, and I’ll be back later in the semester to tell you more about semester two’s papers, to hopefully get you into the spirit of CHEMMAT!