- Introduction
- 1.1 A Brief History of Chemical Engineering
- 1.2 Types of Jobs Chemical Engineers Perform
- 1.3 Industries in Which Chemical Engineers Work
- 1.4 Sustainability
- Self-Assessment Test
- 1.5 Ethics
- Self-Assessment Test
- Summary
- Glossary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.1 A Brief History of Chemical Engineering
Chemical engineering evolved from the industrial applications of chemistry and separation science (i.e., the study of separating components from mixtures) primarily in the refining and chemical industry, which we refer to here as the chemical process industries, CPI. The first high-volume chemical process was implemented in 1823 in England for the production of soda ash, which was used to produce glass and soap.
In 1887, a British engineer, George E. Davis, presented a series of lectures on chemical engineering that summarized industrial practice in the chemical industry in Great Britain. These lectures stimulated interest in the United States and to some degree led to the formation of the first chemical engineering curriculum at MIT in 1888. Over the next 10 to 15 years, a number of US universities embraced the field of chemical engineering by offering curriculum in this area. In 1908, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was formed and since has served to promote and represent the interests of the chemical engineering community.
Mechanical engineers understood the mechanical aspects of process operations, including fluid flow and heat transfer, but they did not have backgrounds in chemistry. Conversely, chemists understood chemistry and its ramifications but lacked the process skills. In addition, neither mechanical engineers nor chemists had backgrounds in separation science, which is critically important to the CPI. As a result, the study of chemical engineering evolved to meet these industrial needs.
The acceptance of the “horseless carriage,” which began commercial production in the 1890s, created a demand for gasoline that ultimately fueled exploration for oil. In 1901, Patillo Higgins, a Texas geologist, and Anthony F. Lucas, a mining engineer, later to be known as “wildcatters,” led a drilling operation that brought in the Spindletop Well just south of Beaumont, Texas. At the time, Spindletop produced more oil than all the other oil wells in the United States. Moreover, a whole generation of wildcatters was born, resulting in a dramatic increase in the domestic production of crude oil, which created a need for larger-scale, more modern approaches to crude refining. As a result, a market developed for engineers who could assist in the design and operation of processing plants for the CPI. The success of oil exploration was to some degree driven by the demand for gasoline for the automobile industry, and ultimately, it led to the widespread adoption of automobiles for the general population due to the resulting lower cost of gasoline.
These early industrial chemists/chemical engineers had few analytical tools available to them and largely depended on their physical intuition to perform their jobs as process engineers. Slide rules were used for performing calculations, and by the 1930s and 1940s, a number of nomographs were developed to assist them in the design and operation analysis of processes for the CPI. Nomographs are charts that provide a concise and convenient means to represent physical property data (e.g., boiling point temperatures or heat of vaporization) and can also be used to provide simplified solutions of complex equations (e.g., pressure drop for flow in a pipe). The availability of computing resources in the 1960s was the beginning of computer-based technology that is commonplace today. For example, since the 1970s, computer-aided design (CAD) packages have allowed engineers to design complete processes by specifying only a minimum of information; all the tedious and repetitive calculations are done by the computer in an extremely short period of time, allowing the design engineer to focus on the task of developing the best possible process design.
In 1959, Professors Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin published their textbook Transport Phenomena that covered fluid flow, heat transfer, and mass transfer. This book was widely adopted throughout the chemical engineering community and provided a much more mathematical and abstract analysis of these topics than had previously been used. The widespread use of this book ushered in a much more analytical approach to chemical engineering than the more empirical approach that preceded it.
During the period 1960–80, the CPI also made the transition from an industry based on innovation in which the profitability of a company depended to a large degree on developing new products and new processing approaches to a more mature commodity industry in which the financial success of a company depended on making their products using established technology more efficiently, resulting in less expensive products.
Globalization of the CPI markets began in the mid-1980s and led to increased competition. At the same time, development in computer hardware made it possible to apply process automation more easily and reliably than ever before. These automation projects provided improved product quality while increasing production rates and overall production efficiency with relatively little capital investment.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, new areas came on the scene that took advantage of the fundamental skills of chemical engineers, including the microelectronic industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the biomedical industry, and nanotechnology. Clearly, the analytical skills and the process training made chemical engineers ideal contributors to the development of the production operations for these industries. In the 1970s, more than 80% of graduating chemical engineers took jobs with the CPI and government. By 2000, that number had dropped to 50% due to increases in the number taking jobs with biotechnology companies, pharmaceutical/health care companies, and electronics and materials companies.