You know what I haven’t been able to use for a while? LaTeX. It’s been too long. None of my classes require me to write decently sized reports and homeworks are better left handwritten (although doing them twice by typesetting them would probably be good for me). I like LaTeX but if I have to write a 1 page memo, I’ll just use Word.

That is until Chemical Engineering Reaction Kinetics (Kinetics) started making us use Jupyter notebook. And I’m liking this thing so far.

For Kinetics, we started off the year using Excel as a simple ODE solver to calculate the reaction yields or more complex systems. But recently we transferred to Python through Jupyter notebook. Having a combination of explanation with actual working code is really nice, it’s one of those things I didn’t realize I was missing out on. My only complaint is that I don’t have all of the nice auto-completion features I do in TeXMaker, so actually writing out \begin{equation} \end{equation} is a chore.

Here’s a link to a Jupyter notebook I made for a HW in my kinetics class. It shows the temperature and concentration profile of 4 adiabitic PFR reactors in series, with three heat exchangers. I created a shooting method to determine the equilibrium conversion which pretty much just brute forces the answer out of the equations but it gets the job done.