Modeling and Analysis Principles for Chemical and Biological Engineers
Research undertaken by modern chemical and biological engineers incorporates a wide range of mathematical principles and methods. This book came about as the authors struggled to incorporate modern topics into a one- or two-semester course sequence for new graduate students, while not losing the essential aspects of traditional mathematical modeling syllabi. Topics that we decided are particularly important but not represented in traditional texts include: matrix factorizations such as the singular value decomposition, basic qualitative dynamics of nonlinear differential equations, integral representations of partial differential equations, probability and stochastic processes, and state estimation. The reader will find many more in the book. These topics are generally absent in many texts, which often have a bias toward the mathematics of 19th- through early 20th-century physics. We also believe that the book will be of substantial interest to active researchers, as it is in many respects a survey of the applied mathematics commonly encountered by chemical and biological engineering practitioners, and contains many topics that were almost certainly absent in their chemical engineering graduate coursework.