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Meet the four ideas behind every factory that makes fuels, foods, medicines and materials — and build a tiny one yourself.

Why heating a mixture can pull it apart, and how a distillation column makes petrol, alcohol and clean water.

The single most useful rule in all of engineering — what goes in must come out — and how to check it yourself.

Two of the simplest machines in any plant — one joins streams together, the other splits one into parts. Build a mixer yourself.

Why almost nothing in a plant happens at room temperature — and how a heater's 'duty' is exactly what shows up on the energy bill.

Ask the AI assistant how your favourite product is made — sugar, soap, steel — and turn its answer into a flowsheet you can run.

Why Pro: A live AI tutor that answers your own 'how is X made?' questions in plain language and turns them into a runnable mini-flowsheet — on demand.

Fenske–Underwood–Gilliland: estimate minimum stages, minimum reflux and a real stage count from your separation targets.

Why real flowsheets loop back on themselves, how the solver tears recycles, and why a purge is unavoidable.

When is ideal good enough, when do you need an equation of state, and when must you model activity coefficients?

Distillation is a stack of equilibrium stages — but the whole idea lives in one flash drum. Run one and watch volatility do the work.

Three reactor models, and the judgement to pick one. See the Gibbs reactor predict an equilibrium with no reaction specified at all.

Real polar mixtures break the simple models. Use the NRTL activity package to model the ethanol–water azeotrope that Ideal and PR get badly wrong.

Why Pro: This lesson uses the NRTL activity-coefficient package — a Pro-only thermodynamic method fitted to real vapor–liquid data — to model the ethanol–water azeotrope that Ideal and Peng-Robinson get badly wrong.

Sooner or later your component isn't in any databank. Use AI to generate a usable property set — and learn to validate it before you trust a result.

Why Pro: This lesson uses Pro-only AI property estimation to generate a consistent property set for a component that isn't in the 3,400-component databank — with the validation flags that tell you how far to trust it — then simulates with it.

Size the equipment of a converged flowsheet, cost it with industry-standard correlations, and learn why big plants win — CAPEX the way plant-design courses teach it.

Why Pro: This lesson works inside the Pro-only Economics environment: it sizes real equipment from your converged simulation, prices it with Turton-class module costing on a live CEPCI basis, and grades you on hitting a capital budget.

Get hands-on fast: build a flash-with-recycle flowsheet from a blank canvas and converge it without peeking at the solution.

Meet a hard purity spec at the lowest reboiler duty you can — the everyday optimization of a working process engineer.

A loop that barely converges and a purge set wrong: diagnose with the convergence monitor, fix it, and explain why.

A new engineer's first discipline: never trust a number from a model whose mass balance doesn't close. Audit a real column.

Modern engineers work with an AI assistant, not without one. Put the AI Process Assistant to work on a real recycle loop — and learn to catch it when it's wrong.

Why Pro: This lesson puts the Pro-only AI Process Assistant to work on a real loop — explaining results, localising a fault and proposing a fix — so you build the judgement to use it well (and catch it when it's confidently wrong).

Turn a converged design into a decision: OPEX, cost of manufacture, NPV and IRR — and the judgement to know which numbers drive the answer.

Why Pro: Runs the full Pro techno-economic analysis: utility-based OPEX from the energy balance, cost of manufacture, discounted-cash-flow profitability and sensitivity — the analysis a process engineer is asked for the first time a manager says 'nice flowsheet, but should we build it?'.

From 'it converged' to 'here is a defensible design'. Optimize a multi-unit section, get an AI review, and generate a PDF design report.

Why Pro: This capstone uses Pro-only features end to end — a larger multi-unit flowsheet, Case Study optimization, an AI design review and a generated PDF design report — to take you from 'I made it converge' to 'here is a defensible design document'.