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Chem Eng: Plumbing with Maths
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By: La_Cebolla
(School of Chemical Eng. and Analytical Science)
Competition Year: 2016 Votes (2) | Comments (0) |
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Hopefully this poem will grab your attention,
It’s full of concepts like angular momentum,
I’m probably the only poet who’s come out of Preston.
Chem Eng quickly demands all of your mental resources,
‘Reynolds number is the ratio of inertial to viscous forces’,
Frictional forces make your train of thought lose traction,
Mass transfer’s the driving force which drives you to distraction,
Then you move to Laplace transforms and back to partial fractions,
Newton’s third law tells you all actions have reactions,
Matrices are pivotal to Gaussian elimination,
And some science puns need no explanation,
In labs it’s not proper to neglect error propagation,
Rate laws need you to concentrate on concentration,
Now we look at Chemical Thermodynamics,
Binary mixtures and statistical mechanics,
For concentrated mixtures, use Raoult’s law,
And if it’s dilute, that’s what Henry’s is for,
And what exactly is chemical potential?
I know what it is: it’s driving me mental,
More convoluted paths have greater tortuosity,
If epsilon is greater, there’s more porosity,
MHMT is all about the velocity,
The resistance to shear stress is called the viscosity,
All of the mentions of Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot,
Can I really pretend that I give a sugar-coated...?
Struggling to look like you’re still paying attention,
When you see for the fourth time the same derivation,
You begin to wonder if you’re being taught in the same, identical tautologies,
For bad jokes and half-rhymes, I make no apologies,
I should try to slip in a rhetorical device like chiasmus,
For my GCSE English I’ll never feel compunctious,
Debates in MLP are laced with logical fallacies,
Contrasting with English Literature’s many essays on phalluses,
Even if students are dead knowledgeable about stuff like latent heat,
They never seem to get it when I say, ‘It’ll be reet’,
I reckon they just don’t listen and it gets my goat,
You wonder if they’re not using their ears or owt,
It’d be proper rude if it were a speech impediment,
But you’re wondering why I’m banging on about my accent,
Instead of writing rhymes about my weekly drinking binge,
Or the many engineering clichés engineered to make you cringe,
Not all hangovers deserve a postmortem,
Even those from when you were mortal peri-(Frank) Morton,
Ultimately I’ve dashed to dash your hopes of iambic pentameters,
Instead you’ve suffered my talk of work done and HAZOP parameters,
Along with occasional mention of forces around objects annular,
This is a summary of my life at the University of Manchester,
So now that I’ve finally lost all of my focus,
I should be about ready to go out to design a process,
Didn’t Einstein say education was what’s left when no schooling remains?
I think that he was right - there’s only Chem Eng in my brain,
Therefore without further discussion of diffusion,
I bring my pun-laden poem to its conclusion.
