Computational Methods in Chemical Engineering with Maple

Book excerpt: This book presents Maple solutions to a wide range of problems relevant to chemical engineers and others. Many of these solutions use Maple’s symbolic capability to help bridge the gap between analytical and numerical solutions. The readers are strongly encouraged to refer to the references included in the book for a better understanding of the physics involved, and for the mathematical analysis. This book was written for a senior undergraduate or a first year graduate student course in chemical engineering. Most of the examples in this book were done in Maple 10. However, the codes should run in the most recent version of Maple. We strongly encourage the readers to use the classic worksheet (*. mws) option in Maple as we believe it is more user-friendly and robust. In chapter one you will find an introduction to Maple which includes simple basics as a convenience for the reader such as plotting, solving linear and nonlinear equations, Laplace transformations, matrix operations, ‘do loop,’ and ‘while loop. ’ Chapter two presents linear ordinary differential equations in section 1 to include homogeneous and nonhomogeneous ODEs, solving systems of ODEs using the matrix exponential and Laplace transform method. In section two of chapter two, nonlinear ordinary differential equations are presented and include simultaneous series reactions, solving nonlinear ODEs with Maple’s ‘dsolve’ command, stop conditions, differential algebraic equations, and steady state solutions. Chapter three addresses boundary value problems.