Chemical Reaction Engineering, 3rd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Too detailed
Review: As a final year undergraduate, I find that this book is fairly useless. Although the information is in there, it is nigh on impossible to find. It would probably be of use to someone who is working on research in that field, but to a student who has not yet done such detailed work, don't bother. Save your money and spend it on beer.

Rating:
Summary: Decent Book but not Spectacular
Review: As a student, I found the material difficult and challenging. Later, as a professional, I referred to this book often when faced with tough reactor calculations and difficult kinetic question. Dr. Levenspiel explains everything very well in his examples; the problem sets were nightmarish, but, then, our professor was awful. All in all, the book is highly useful to student and professional alike. I wish that I had had a good instructor, I would have developed a better appreciation the material as a student. Definitely a book for any chemical engineer's library.

Rating:
Summary: A decent undergraduate book
Review: CRE is not a bad book. The author does a good job of explaining reactor design fundamentals, from simple kinetic models to complex reactor systems involving heat/material transfer or multiple reaction contents. He lays the groundwork well early on be using simple, clear examples. There are numerous typos (mostly in the text, though, not the problems. The text itself is in large and legible type. In addition, the book is not overcrowded-like a lot of life science books-with meaningless pictures, text, history, etc (but it might take the boredom meter to a new level for some readers). Although not a big deal, Levenspiel uses some language that makes you kinda wonder what planet he came from. Also, the author puts all the variable nomenclature at the beginning of the book, which is really annoying because you have to flip back and forth until you memorize each character variable. Other than that, it should be adequate to get you through the course w/o a great deal of trouble.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Chem E book ever
Review: I think this is the worest Chem E book ever. too bad its one of the only aviablable books for reaction engineering since levenspeil was the first to do alot of these things back in the 50s and 60s. there are numerous mistakes in every chapter. Be weary when using this book to study from.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Chem E book ever
Review: I think this is the worest Chem E book ever. too bad its one of the only aviablable books for reaction engineering since levenspeil was the first to do alot of these things back in the 50s and 60s. there are numerous mistakes in every chapter. Be weary when using this book to study from.

Rating:
Summary: A good book at higher level
Review: I used this book as a textbook in my undergraduate. In an undergraduate study, it is necessary to have new concepts explained to you in a unified manner so that ones sees where all the chemical engineering subjects are heading to. Chemical reaction engineering (CRE) basically deals with energy and material balance applied to chemical reactors to achieve a given purpose. The book tells you all the fundamentals about the chemical reaction engineering, the underlying principles but fails to draw this message straight that CRE is nothing but application of energy and material balance. And at undergraduate level, I could not draw this inference on my own and learned it in the graduate class when I took the advanced level course. The book also does not deal with the modern tools of solving reactor design problems with computers. And we used Fogler. I would suggest book by Fogler which could be used as an undergraduate as well as graduate text/reference book. If you need to go to the earlier work and want to pursue research in this field, then Levenspiel is good as it has some original work references ( I believe this is an old book on CRE). Once you have the feel for the subject than the use of this book is undisputed. But if you are using this book to study CRE first time then I would recommend you use some good text book.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic. Complete, Readable. Not Sugar-Coated.
Review: My focus in using this book was to characterize a very complex heterogeneous (fluid-particle) system. Couldn't have done it without old Octave. Thanks, man, I feel I know you.