WEEK 1
Week 1 of school just started and we were introduced to this module, Introduction to Chemical Product Design. We met Dr. Noel, who will be our lecturer for this module this semester. He went through an in-depth tutorial lesson with us, explaining the entire module and what is required from us.
Paragraphs below show the knowledge that we have gained from week 1's tutorial session and the stuff we did.
❗ Module Overview.
In this module, it provides us with an introductory insight into the types of skills that one might need to equip themselves with and prepares us for the demand of future workforce.
This module uses the renowned education framework, CDIO, which stands for Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate.
In addition to Materials for Design, which was taught to us in year 1, Introduction to Chemical Product Design brings us more in depth into the conceiving and designing stage of a product. We will slowly work our way up to out Capstone Project in year 3.
❓ What is a Chemical Product?
A chemical product is a product that is designed or manufactured using chemical engineering principles. Principles include fluid flow, heat transfer, mass transfer and thermodynamics. There are 4 categories for chemical products. They are commodities, chemical devices, molecular products and micro-structured products.
Specifically for this module, we will be focusing on chemical devices. They are devices where miniature processes occurs that accomplishes a particular chemical transformation, thus proving convenience for the users.
🙉 Activity.
Household - appliances - incandescent light bulb.
An incandescent light bulb works when an electric current passes through a tungsten filament and heating it to a temperature hot enough to produce light as the output of the light bulb (heating). The envelope of the bulb is filled with an inert gas to ensure that chemicals and the environment do not react with the bulb, especially the filament, thus preserving it for a longer period of time (reaction).
The incandescent light bulb is categorized under micro-structured products as it only provides specific function to its users, which is to provide light by heating the filament in the bulb.
🙋 Team Formation.
We also learnt about Bruce Tuckman's 5 stages of team formation model during our tutorial lesson. The different phases are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.
Forming
This is where a new team is formed and ground rules are set. Members are still foreign to one another.
Storming
Soon after, members will start to communicate with their feelings more, expressing their own opinions, refusing to work together as a team and views themselves as individuals. Thus, not following instructions and going against one another.
Norming
Teammates will start to work together and feel more like a team. They realizes that work can be done and achieved if they start to accept their teammates more.
Performing
The team will start to trust one another more and they will start to perform better as one where all members take on equal responsibilities for the team.
Adjourning
The team is done with their assessment and starts to plan to transition roles and remembering the members' efforts and contributions.
The above shows how team members should work together in order to become a high performing team.
The video below gives a more in depth explanation on Tuckman's different phases of a team.
😴 Process of Creating the Blog.
Lastly, before the tutorial session ended, we were tasked to create our very own blog for the team to document and record our progress throughout this entire module. Having good documentation is important as many changes are inevitable when we are designing a product, thus documenting them helps us keep track of our changes and avoids confusion.
This will also serve as a great manual for the team to refer back to when we are required to perform a task already completed in the past as it will refresh our memory and help us complete the same task again.
This whole process of creating the blog was tough as we could not decide on a design that we want and we have no idea how we want to present our blog to the audiences. After some discussion, we came up with this final design that satisfy our requirements.
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