Material and Energy Balances: Diagnostics

About two years ago I realized that the solution manual for "Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes", by Felder and Rousseau is now widely available on the Internet.  In the past, student performance on homework provided an excellent prediction of their mastery of course material, however, this is now no longer true. In an effort to prevent my students from shooting themselves in the foot, I developed a series of classroom exercises and diagnostics.  These could be considered "quizzes", except I did not grade any of the exercises.  The diagnostics allowed me to assess student mastery of course material, and develop plans to teach/resolve class weakness.

Most of these exercises are based on homework problems from the Felder and Rousseau text, but in many cases I modified them to illustrate a specific area I thought was a weakness.  In most cases, I tried to limit the time for solution to about 15 minutes.

Feedback from students via the "student evaluation of teaching" was overwhelmingly positive, and student performance on exams improved significantly.

For anyone interested, the exercises are listed below.  Feel free to use them as you see fit.

1. Combustion reaction + bypass
2. Methanol production involving both recycle and purge concepts
3. Percent excess air
4. Ideal gas law and unit conversions
5. Raoult's law
   
6. Equations of State (ideal gas law, compressibility factor and SRK)
7. Condensers: Raoult's law with one condensible component
8. Steam tables and heat capacities
9. Combined phase behavior and energy balance: part 1
   
10. Combined phase behavior and energy balance: part 2
11. Combined phase behavior and energy balance: part 3
12. Phase behavior, energy balances and steam tables
13. Chemical reaction + energy balance