Customer Reviews

Chemical Engineering License Review, 2nd ed (Engineering Press at OUP)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This definitely is NOT the best book for review for the PE Chemical Engineering Exam. It is strewn with errors in the formulas and sample problems. Because this book is written in a size 12 font with 1-3 inch margins at the sides and bottom, it is a lot longer than it should be. This format should give the reader a sense of accomplishment while studying (Hey, I've done 10 pages already!), but the sample solutions are so time-consuming to work through that a few simple pages can take an hour. The authors dispense with units on most problems and combine several solution steps into one, leaving the reader to retrace every step to figure out where he got lost. On a PE test, you would be penalized for not referencing your starting equation, not carrying and cancelling units, and other sloppy habits and mistakes committed by the authors. Buy Randall Robinson's PE Study Guide instead. It is more straightforward, contains much more reference information, and the author has spent more than a week writing the book!

I took Chemical Engineering PE exam in April 2007 for the first time. I passed the exam. When I was solving the problems in the actual exam I knew what I was doing. I was confident that I will pass. The main reason was Chemical Engineering License Review.

License review is written by chemical engineers. This book brushed up my chemical engineering knowledge. Review has addressed all areas in PE exam. But the best covered area is Chemical Reaction Engineering. There are lot of questions on reaction engineering (11%). Problem with kinetics is that we do not use it everyday like fluid dynamics or heat transfer. This book will bring you up to the speed for kinetics problems. Kinetics is the area which will make it or break it.

Review was great help in plant design and operation section. I found this section very useful during actual examination.

Heat transfer chapter has good review of shell and tube exchangers. Fluid dynamics chapter helped me in flow of fluids in pipes and pump calcs most.

License review gives extensive coverage for mass transfer. Absorption and distillation are very important sections and this book prepared me well to solve those questions.

Book had printing mistakes but these mistakes did not deter me from understanding the principles. There are other reference books/solved problems (Chemical Engineering Reference Manual, NCEES problems) available and they are useful too. While studying I kept this book as a main focus and used other reference material also. Study from more than one source is a must. If one starts early enough and balance fundamentals and problem solving properly then passing in the first attempt is not tough.

PE exam tests experience and fundamentals. License Review will clear your fundamentals. It helped me during exam and I am going to keep it as a reference also.

I did not have resort to option elimination. In most of the cases I got the answer and it matched with one of the option. Now I can say my answers were correct (atleast most of them!!!) because I passed the exam.

This is an excellent study guide with practical examples. I bought this book and its companion texts. It covers most fo the chemical engineering topics for the exam.

The latest edition (2007) has very few errors. The errors are posted on publisher's website as they are discovered. The reader should ignore any review done on earlier editions.

The 2007 edition of the book is thoroughly revised and includes information not only for the PE examination, but also for doing everyday process engineering calculations. I strongly recommend anyone engaged in process engineering or preparing for P.E. examination to buy this book along with the companion book on Problems and Solutions.

This book, comprising twenty chapters, has nearly 800 pages: a voluminous book. The chapters include Units and Dimensions (22 pages), Material Balances (54 pages), Energy Balance and Thermodynamics (53 pages), Fluid Mechanics(78 pages), Heat Transfer(69 pages), Evaporation(14 pages), Filtration (16 pages), Membrane Separation(9 pages), Mass Transfer Fundamentals(52 pages), Distillation(64 pages), Absorption(25 pages), Liquid-Liquid Extraction and Leaching(33 pages), Adsorption(18 pages), Psychrometry, Humidification, and Drying(23 pages), Chemical Reaction Engineering(78 pages), Process Control(25 pages), Corrosion and Materials of Construction(16 pages), Equipment Design(40 Pages), Engineering Economics(24 pages), and Plant Safety and Environmental Consideration(59 pages), Index(16 pages).

Each chapter has numerous example problems to illustrate the application. The Introduction of the book, not mentioned above, gives information about how to become a professional engineer, examination structure, the website and telephone number of various State Authorities, and practical hints like what to take to examinations.

Chapter 1 discusses the various units including the US Customary unit and SI, and the conversion factors. Chapter 2 starts with material properties, discusses mass balances, phase behavior, ideal and real gases, fuels and combustion. Chapter 3 deals with thermodynamic properties, three laws of thermodynamics, thermo-chemistry, power cycles and refrigeration. Chapter 4 deals with Fluid Mechanics. This is a very strong chapter not only for P.E. examination, but also for regular process design. It deals with fluid mechanics application including parallel and branched systems, compressible fluid, and two-phase flow, the 3-K method of calculating fluid flow resistance, and pump hydraulics. The line-sizing guideline table 4.2 is very handy and demonstrates practical wisdom of the authors.

The chapter 5 on heat transfer is another very good chapter. All modes of heat transfer including conduction, convection, and radiation, and unit operations of sublimation, batch heat exchanger design, nonmetallic heat exchangers, extended surface heat exchanger, and effectiveness NTU method have been covered. Chapters 6 and 7 cover both fundamentals and applications through worked out problems in evaporator and filter design. Chapter 8 covers the unit operation of reverse osmosis. The mathematical model for batch reverse osmosis is quite handy. Chapter 9 shows an elaborate treatment of mass transfer fundamentals including molecular diffusion, convective and turbulent mass transfer, inter-phase mass transfer, VLE, and mass transfer in packed beds.

Chapter 10 on distillation is a well written chapter covering flash distillation, differential distillation, McCabe-Thiele method, short-cut methods on multi-component distillations etc. Chapter 11 on absorption is very handy with step-by-step procedure of designing an absorption column with a lot of practical tips. Chapter 12 on liquid-liquid extraction and leaching demonstrates an excellent application of right triangular diagram on extraction and determination of minimum reflux ratio, and design of packed column in extraction service. Similar comments apply to Chapter 13 which deals with adsorption and design of fixed bed adsorption. Chapter 14 addresses Psychrometry, Humidification, and Drying. It explains well such terms as humid volume, humid heat capacity, wet and dry bulb temperature, adiabatic saturation temperature, and demonstrate the use of humidity chart very well through examples.

Chapter 15 is thorough on Chemical Reaction Engineering, interpretation of kinetic data and the constants of the rate equation, reactor design, mass and energy balance, product distribution and its dependence on temperature, batch reactor, CSTR, packed bed reactor, catalytic reactor, ignition-extinction curve and multiple steady states in heat transfer, and is followed by numerous example problems. Chapter 16 addresses the basic aspects of process control including feedback and feed forward control, application of Laplace transforms, control actions, first and second order systems, and concepts of stability criteria. Chapter 17 outlines the eight forms of corrosion and has good tips on how to avoid corrosion by a good mechanical design. Chapter 18 on Equipment Design has a wealth of practical knowledge not taught in school. I understood for the first time the difference between the design pressure and maximum allowable working pressure as defined in ASME Code. It instructs on how to develop the mechanical design parameters of equipment.

Chapter 19 on Engineering Economics deals with time value of money, depreciation calculations, and cost comparison of alternatives, Chemical Engineering Plant Cost Index, break-even analysis, optimization, and many solved problems. Chapter 20 on Plant Safety and Environmental Consideration is another chapter full of practical knowledge not taught in many schools. It deals with toxicology and industrial hygiene, fire and explosion issues, hazard and operability studies, environmental considerations including air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution, and noise abatement. It also gives guidelines of sizing emergency relief devices for various over pressure scenarios including runaway reactions per established codes and standards. Finally, it includes a sixteen-page subject index to locate a subject very quickly.

There are some areas that the authors should consider to improve. There has been some duplication of efforts. For example, the generalized pressure drop correlation is duplicated in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11, the former having the latest one. There are some errors which the reader can quickly figure out: hopefully they will be eliminated in the next edition. Overall, this is an excellent study book for P.E. Exam, and a book I would like to have as a companion in my chemical engineering career.

This is an excellent book for refreshing core concepts in chemical engineering, particularly if you've been out of school for a long while. It's also loaded with solved example problems to give the reader practice solving problems with speed. Although not necessarily recommended, one can actually get by on the numerous example problems in this book alone without having to buy separate books on practice problems.

What this books lacks is reference information in the form of tables and charts, etc. It is also skimpy on the many minor topics that invariably get asked on the exam but that are too minor and too numerous for a student to spend much time preparing for. I also wish it were hardbound because the soft cover gets beat up very quickly. For reference information for use during the exam, choose Lindeburg's Chemical Engineering Reference Manual instead. The Das/Prabhudesai and Lindeburg books complement each other perfectly, one mostly for use to get ready for the exam, the other for use during the exam. Lindeburg's book isn't particularly good as an exam prep study guide, but the Das/Prabhudesai books is.

My advice for anyone preparing for the chemical PE is to get both books. I passed the Chem E PE on my first attempt this way. The Lindeburg is indispensible as a handy reference during the exam. Read my review on it, too. Yes, you'll have to shell out the money for both sets of books, but doing so is still far cheaper than having to take the exam twice! Use both books to pass the exam.

One thing to keep in mind about the PE exam is that it tests for acceptable competence instead of excellence (This generally means answering at least 70% of the questions correctly). One doesn't need to have been an A-caliber student in college to pass it. The passing rate for first-time takers has been over 70% in recent years. The combined pass rate is around 50% because it's dragged down by repeat takers who have only a 40% pass rate.

This book is a completely useless resource for the Chemical Engineering PE Exam. The format and layout of the book is clumsy and poorly structured. The errors in the text are frequent and in my judgement, completely unacceptable considering that the nature of the subject matter is a review for a professional engineer, which implies high standards and an even higher level of performance. The associated sample exam text proves to be more of a hindrance than a help because it leaves the reader with an inadequate amount of information to solve the sample problems and an even more inadequate reference for solutions to the problems. To date, the most effective use of this text that I have been able to devise is its use as kindling for my fireplace. The was, by far, the biggest waste of money that I have ever suffered.

FYI: I passed the 4/09 exam on the first try. My other materials were the 6 Minute Solutions, the NCEES Practice Test, and the Lindberg Reference Manual.

I bought this book because it was a reasonably-sized (thickness-wise) overall review of a ChE undergrad education... and b/c almost 5 years out of school, I hadn't used one iota of my education, and needed such a book.

The Review was often presented in a way I didn't learn -- so while I was frustrated, I was forced to learn and understand more. The book is bad about errors and not defining variables, the practice problems are even worse than 6 Minute Solutions (see my review for that book), and ultimately the book might drive you to insanity, violence, or both.

But, I needed an entire undergrad review in one book, one that I could forge through on nights and weekends in 3 months, and this fit the bill. It's designed for the previous generation of PE exam, but still worked for my needs.

Don't be fooled by the updated cover. The paperback version does not fix any of the serious flaws contained in the hardcover version. Don't waste your money.

I am not making this up. One of the features listed in bullet form on the cover is:

* Written by two achomplished Professional Chemical Engineers

I implore you not to buy this book.

There is no book yet published that is particularly good for the ChE PE, but this one doesn't deserve such poor reviews. It is far more coherent than the most popular review book (by Professional Publications), although it doesn't have reference tables or graphs that might be commonly needed. It is more like a distillation of ChE textbooks.