What chemical and process engineering actually does, the mass and energy balance as the field's foundational tool, the process flow diagram, unit operations as the building blocks of a process, and a roadmap of this 21-item program.
Chemical and process engineering transforms raw materials — crude oil, natural gas, ore, agricultural feedstock — into the fuels, plastics, fertilizers, and medicines a modern economy runs on, through some combination of physical and chemical change at commercial scale. This module builds the mental model the rest of the program assumes: the mass and energy balance as bookkeeping applied to atoms and energy, the process flow diagram as the first formal representation of a process, and unit operations as the recurring building blocks — pumps, exchangers, columns, reactors — every plant is assembled from.
By the end of this module you should be able to read a PFD's stream table and explain why the mass balance and energy balance are almost never solved independently — a foundation Module 2's fluid mechanics and Module 3's heat transfer both build directly on top of.