Customer Reviews

Chemical Engineering Reference Manual for the PE Exam, 6th ed.

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the best reference book available for the chemical PE exam. If you can only bring one book to the exam room, this is it.

The fact that the author is not a chemical engineer shows in the presentation and contents. As has been pointed out by others, the book is extremely skimpy on chemical kinetics. The kinetics chapter has only 4 and a half pages of text, but you can bring other books or your own notes to the exam to make up for this deficiency. The distillation section only alludes to the concepts of minimum reflux and total reflux graphically in an off-handed way, with no verbal discussion of these 2 important concepts at all. In fact, the term "minimum reflux" is not even listed in the index. The important concept of fugacity is nowhere to be found in the whole book. However, overall, I still think the author and his assistants did an excellent job putting together this marvelous reference book for the exam, the skimpy kinetics portion and other oversights notwithstanding.

This book isn't particularly good as an exam prep study guide because it has too much information, a great deal of it on minor subjects most chem E's did not learn in school. Using it to prepare for the PE exam is a bit like using Perry's Handbook to study for the exam. It can be done, but one will quickly get bogged down. It is, however, indispensable for use during the exam because of its very rich collection of reference information one will find useful during the exam, such as formulas, charts, tables, constants, and unit conversion tables, etc, plus materials on the many minor topics that most chem E's did not learn in school and do not have time now to prepare for. Don't study using this book. Instead, browse through the pages and be aware of what's in it so that when a question on an arcane subject, such as environmental law, OSHA law, safety, etc, comes up during the exam you can quickly find an answer by using the index. I answered many more questions during the exam by relying on this book this way. It's the most useful book to bring to the exam room.

For exam preparation to review the main chemical engineering concepts and to practice solving problems with speed, use Kaplan's Chemical Engineering: License Review by Dilip Das and Rajaram Prabhudesai. Das/Prabhudesai is much more user-friendly and much less dense, but the Das/Prabhudesai book is very lacking in reference information, something that is the obvious strength of Lindeburg.

I credit my passing the Chem E PE exam on my first attempt in large part to having this book with me. I had been out of school for 22 years and didn't use my Chem E training on my job during this span and I only put in 30 to 50 hours of study, plus another 42 hours SITTING(big emphasis here!) through a review course where I did not do a single homework assignment, so altogether less than 100 hours of actual preparation time however I count it. Still, I managed to pull it off on the first try. Could I have succeeded anyway without this book? Possibly, but this Lindeburg book certainly helped tremendously in the success of my endeavor.

My advice to anyone preparing for the chemical PE is to get both Das and Lindeburg. 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!

Bottomline: this is an indispensible REFERENCE MANUAL for use during the exam(look at the book title!), but not a great study guide. Get both Das and this book to pass the exam.

This is a must have for the PE just like Perry's handbook for Chemical engineering. The whole Lindeburg series is good. The practice problem companion has 450 problems!

Also recommend other classic Chemical engineering books:
Levenspiel - Kinetics
McCabe-Smith-Harriott - Unit Ops
Crane Technical Paper 410

Other study materials:
PE practice problems from NCEES
PE exam from Nandagopal
Six-minute problems for PE exam

I just wrote a long review and the browser crashed...

The book is lacking in bread-and-butter chemE material. Mass transfer problems are all very simple and solutions are only presented graphically (what if there isn't a graph on the test?). The Kinetics section is only 8 pages long!!! That is only 8 pages to summarize the reaction rates, Plug flow, CSTRs and other goodies. It really need more kinetics.

I'd still buy it again.

This book was a great overall reference during the PE Exam. As mentioned in other reviews, the kinetics portion is lacking, so bring a copy of Chemical Reaction Engineering by Levenspiel to the exam. Other recommended titles for use on the exam: Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, Fundamentals Principles of Chemical Processes by Felder & Rousseau and Unit Operations of Chemical Engineering by McCabe, Smith and Harriot.

First of all, you should really use this book to study for the exam. It does a very good job with heat transfer, combustion, work and energy balances, phase diagrams, and liquid-vapor-solid equilibrium including McCabe-Thiele. Also just full of good fundamental things: ideal gas law, real gases, steam, etc. I took the exam twice and passed the second time mostly due to a change in my method of studying. I haven't done design engineering in years, so I felt like I was starting from scratch. Ok, tips and tricks:

* Buy this book along with the quick reference guide. Plan on using ONLY the quick reference guide for the exam, however, make page # references to the larger reference manual within the quick reference. My quick reference was FULL of notes and pages and the 2nd time, I only opened the larger book for reference material, not equations.

* Memorize the units for all characteristics - pressure, enthalpy, viscosity, specific heat, density, molecular weight etc.

* Don't spend too much time trying to re-learn integral calculus so you can solve kinetics problems. Actually, don't spend too much time on kinetics at all if it's not already a strong point for you. Become very familiar with the most basic of questions: heat transfer, fluid dynamics, mass and energy balances, reaction stoichiometry, PV=nRT, and you'll pass. Kinetics is a small percentage.

* Use Cameron's for fluid dynamics and don't bog yourself down with Bernoulli. Just think of liquid in terms of head, and understand how to convert to pressure.

* Bring Perry's to the exam (don't spend much time going through it before hand) as a resource for the "weird" questions that come up. You'll be surprised how many exam questions seem to be lifted right out of sentences in Perry's.

Good luck to everyone!

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 old D&P License Review.

This book is not as statistically complete as Perry's of course, and you need to get that book too for the exam (i.e., stupid look-it-up misc. materials or chemical properties questions) but it's the best all-around everything book for the exam. Organized fantastically, written in dummy's language (thanks Lindberg), used for at least 75 % of the Q's. If you're a real nerd you'll like it just for the reading (it's interesting). This book I'm keeping... and my job is not even real engineering!

This product did exactly what it was supposed to do, be the primary reference for the PE exam.

I just completed my Chemical PE Exam a few weeks back. I really only opened 2 books during the exam - this one, and the Kaplan Chemical PE Review book. As the name implies, this book wasn't very helpful for studying for the test; since I didn't use it to study with, I found that I didn't use it during the test much either. It is of little help for the questions involving theory, but very good at straight forward exam problems that require analytical solutions. If you have a Perry's, I wouldn't spend the money on this reference maual. If you also buy the supporting material to go along with this book (practice problems, etc...) it most likely would be all you need to prepare for the exam.

Another note on the Kaplan series - I used this almost exclusively to study with and relied on it heavily during the exam. This book covered exam topics pretty well, with not alot of extra overlap. However, the topics go WAY into depth, way past anything that could ever be asked as an exam problem. Solutions for example and practice problems often equire 4-5 pages in the text. Also the book is RIDDLED with mistakes, which is especially infuriating in the practice problems and ridiculous considering the price tag. Unfortunately, there aren't too many options for the Chemical PE.

I want to update my previous review since i pass the exam, I have to say this book is just a reference, the questions inside the book are totally different from actual exam, my recommendation is DO NOT study the examples just use the tables and figures.

I used this book quite extensively in my preparation for the PE Exam. I also used it in the exam as one of the two most important references (the others being Perry's).

There were good sections on:
* Test preparation guidelines
* Thermodynamics
* Combustion and chemical reactions
* Fluid mechanics / momentum transfer
* Heat transfer
* Psychrometrics
* Economics

The following sections do need some improvement and beefing up:
* Kinetics. Many other reveiwers have already commented on this. You will need a good textbook on the subject in addition to this book.
* Mass Transfer. The sections here are mostly acceptable but as I found out when I ordered the sample NCEES exam, I needed a lot more than was in this text. If you order this book you will also need a good unit operations text to consult. A specific weakness was in the area of absorption/stripping columns.

There was also a lot of information that really is unnecessary. While very interesting, the Environmental section, encompassing eight chapters, provides little in the way of topics pertinent to the exam. The same holds true for the design section. Besides psychrometrics and economics, there is very little useful pertaining to the exam material.

The book has some mistakes, but [...] has a pretty thorough list of errata. The online program associated with the text provides access to an experienced engineer who provides insight into the most important topics on the exam.

If I had to do it over, I would still purchase this book. Thanks to much of what was in here, I passed the exam in the first attempt - and it has been a long time since I've taken any type of ChemE exam!