The website was down Dec. 6th and 7th. I was updating Introduction to Pressure Relief Valves Part 3 and ran into a nasty WordPress bug that deleted all of the articles and locked me out of writing anything new.
I had to revert the site to it’s Dec. 3rd state to fix things. If you registered on the site or provided comments between the 3rd and the 6th please do so a second time. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I stumbled upon this classroom course one day, while trying to do something particularly difficult in Aspentech’s Hysys. I learned a lot. The intricacies of the balance function, the different kinds of reactions, how to leverage the spreadsheet operation.
If you’re a heavy Hysys user, you may pick up some valueable tips at this Rice Engineering Hysys Design page.
Need help developing your thesis for an engineering, science, or business graduate degree? Or perhaps you want to know what you’re getting into before you sign on for grad school? Maybe you’re researching engineering degrees online and found this article?
Assuming you’re not about to take a course-based Masters program1, the most important new challenge that graduate school poses is the thesis. It’s a daunting problem: you need to get up-to-date in the latest research of your field, pick an entirely novel problem, develop a research plan, conduct careful experiments, and write a detailed thesis defending your work. What problems can you attack? How should you structure it? How can you avoid getting bogged down in the details? When are you doing enough to complete it?
After some asking around, I present two of the better articles on the subject. There’s some detailed and humane advice.
For Prospective Graduate Students
You Must Know Why Your Work is Important.
When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isn’t. If you do not understand something, don’t feel bad – it’s not your fault, it’s the author’s. He didn’t write clearly enough.
If some authority figure tells you that you aren’t accomplishing anything because you aren’t taking courses and you aren’t gathering data, tell him what you’re up to. If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what you’re doing, dammit.
This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, “What am I doing here?” Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you won’t feel that it is yours, you won’t have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly, your PhD work will shape your future. It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a life’s work. It is also important to the dynamic of science that your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a whole new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you don’t know – and I mean really know – why you’re doing it?
An excellent resource on process, instrumentation, and piping engineering: the Engineering Design Encyclopedia. Whether you’re looking for a sample heat exchanger calculation, just learning what the term flow meter means, or trying to discover how a sulfur recovery unit works, there’s some good content here. It’s not yet comprehensive enough to earn the term “encyclopedia,” but it’s worth a quick peek to anyone finding my blog useful.
A lot of what is written about management is pure fluff. But a few things are keepers, and one day I stumbled across something worth putting in “the file.” A successful manager at Microsoft shares a few tips for success, mainly about the power of priorities and knowing when to say no: even to an idea that is good. (I know that this is a totally novel concept for this blog).
Check it out, it’s a worthy supplement to your Saturday paper: The Art of Project Management: How to Make Things Happen. Here’s a selected quote:
Effective PMs simply consider more alternatives before giving up than other people do. They question the assumptions that were left unchallenged by others, because they came from either a VP people were afraid of or a source of superior expertise that no one felt the need to challenge. The question “How do you know what you know?” is the simplest way to clarify what is assumed and what is real, yet many people are afraid, or forget, to ask it. Being relentless means believing that 99% of the time there is a solution to the problem (including, in some cases, changing the definition of the problem), and that if it can’t be found with the information at hand, then deeper and more probing questions need to be asked, no matter who has to be challenged. The success of the project has to come first.
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