y not a chemical engineer?
The first course in Chemical Engineering was established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in America in 1888 and taught by Lewis M. Norton. This introduced established engineering practices to chemistry students. MIT continued to lead the way - in 1916 Arthur D Little founded a School of Chemical Engineering Practice. Little also coined the famous phrase unit operation, which played a central role in distinguishing Chemical Engineering as a profession. Warren Lewis, William Walker and William McAdams went on to establish the first department of Chemical Engineering in 1920, again at MIT, and wrote the first thorough text book, Principles of Chemical Engineering, in 1923.


What is Chemical Engineering?

Our modern society relies on the work of Chemical Engineers - they help manage resources, protect the environment and control health and safety procedures, while developing the processes that make the products we desire or depend on.
Chemical Engineering is all about changing raw materials into useful products you use everyday in a safe and cost effective way. For example petrol, plastics and synthetic fibres such as polyester and nylon, all come from oil.
Chemical Engineers understand how to alter the chemical, biochemical or physical state of a substance, to create everything from face creams to fuels.
Biochemical Engineering, a more recent offshoot of Chemical Engineering, uses the very latest technology to produce pharmaceuticals and foods.
Chemical engineering and its beginning Chemical engineering is quite peculiar among the many branches of engineering. Other branches – civil, mechanical, electrical, aerospace – are mainly applied physics. Chemical engineering is unique in integrating chemistry with physics to investigate systematically industrial processes of chemical production. Biochemistry is, alongside genetics, a major strand of molecular biology. Molecules, the transformation of which is the fort of chemistry, are ideal building blocks on the nanometer scale. Chemical engineering occupies a strategic position in the Big Things of the twenty-first century: biotechnology and nanotechnology. It is well prepared for the challenges, partly because from its inception it has adopted the open spirit of science, developed principles susceptible to modified generalization and ready to jump on new knowledge to make it productive. (Its ranks boast the highest percentage of PhDs than any other branch of engineering in the United States). Historians generally agree that chemical engineering was developed by the Americans in the beginning of the twentieth century. By that time, organic chemistry was almost a century old, and inorganic chemistry, counting from Antoine Lavoisier’s pioneering work in the 1780s, even older. Industries for inorganic chemicals were widespread. Organic chemicals were more complicated, but industries using them to make dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and other products were quite advanced. Why did chemical engineering come so late? The lucrative organic chemicals industry was dominated by Germany. Its dyestuffs firms, the first to realize the importance of maintaining a technological edge, established the world’s first industrial research laboratories. Industrial researchers cooperated closely with staffs of graduate schools, another institution pioneered by the Germans. Together they made Germany the world leader in research, chemistry, and chemical industry, attracting students and professionals from many other countries. The three American who founded chemical engineering, William Walker, Warren Lewis, and Arthur D. Little, had all studied in Germany. When, back home, the Americans were struggling to development the contents for this new branch of engineering, the Germans invented and industrialized the Haber-Bosch process to synthesize ammonia and produce synthetic fertilizer commercially. The Haber-Bosch process, winner of two Nobel Prizes, is even today acknowledged as one of the crowning achievements in chemical engineering. Yet it was not the work of chemical engineers; Fritz Haber was a chemist, Carl Bosch a mechanical engineer. Cooperation between chemists and mechanical engineers was the standard practice in Germany. Its prowess was proved by thriving industries. Why didn’t the Germans develop chemical engineering? They surely had the brains. What did the Americans find wanting in prevailing practices? What advantages did chemical engineering bring? What new technologies did it bring? To try to answer these questions we have to examine the industrial structures in the two counties as well as the technical contents of chemical engineering itself.
Products and processes of production What purposes does chemical engineering serve? To understand its functions, we must distinguish between a product and the process of its production. An automobile is a product, mass production a process. Consumers, who come into contact with products only, seldom think about production processes. Without efficient processes, however, they would not be offered such great varieties of products at such affordable prices. Product and process both require engineering, but different kinds of engineering. In chemistry it may be confusing, because chemical reactions are usually called processes. We will not use this term and reserve “process” for production process on the industrial scale. Students in chemistry classes shake a test tube or stir a beaker over a flame to speed up a chemical reaction. Industrial plants cannot simply shake or stir a thousand-liter tank over a furnace, not because it is too heavy but because it is too dangerous. Heat transportation and distribution is much more difficult in large containers because of their relatively small surface-to-volume ratios, and uneven distribution in a tank of chemical reactants can end in a deadly explosion. To scale up a chemical reaction from test-tube to industrial level requires a lot of knowledge and effort. This is apparent in the Haber-Bosch process. Haber’s method for synthesizing ammonia required temperatures up to 500°C and pressures up to 1000 atmospheres. Because such high pressure and temperature were enormously difficult to attain on the industrial scale, his invention might have remained a laboratory curiosity. Fortunately, BASF, armed with the world’s first industrial R&D facility, invested heavily in developing processes for high volume production. The complexity of scale-up was acknowledge by the Nobel Prize awarded Bosch, who headed the scaling-up project, (Haber had got his already). in production processes chemical engineering found its niche. But the question remains: Why did the Germans left it to the Americans? To answer this question, let us take a look at the structures of chemical industry in the two countries.

Chemical industries and engineering

Germany ● economy of scope ● fine chemicals: dyestuffs, drugs 137,000s in thousands of dyes ● advanced science, small volume ● product innovation → chemistry ● chemist & mechanical engineer ● industrial R&D → proprietary 1827 Liebig’s Lab. at Giessen 1860s Technische Hochschule Höchst, Bayer, BASF 1877 BASF’s Main Laboratory 1880s physical chemistry 1899 Doktor-Ingenieure 1908 Haber: ammonia synthesis 1911 Bosch: ammonia production

USA ● economy of scale ● heavy chemicals: soda, petroleum 2,250,000 tones of sulfuric acid ● capital intensive, high volume ● production process → engineering ● chemical engineer ● university R&D → open science 1861 MIT 1888 Chemical engineering course 1908 Am. Inst. of Chemical Engineers 1915 Little: unit operations 1923 Walker & Lewis: Principles of Ch.E. 1929 Ch.E. research group in DuPont 1920- petroleum refining 1940- petrochemical

Sophisticated products and scientific research Chemicals come in great varieties, even without counting plastics and synthetic fibers, which did not exist at the historical time at issue. Most chemical do not reach consumers but are used up in manufacturing processes, such as bleaching agents in the textile and paper industries. They roughly fall into two classes. Heavy chemicals such as acid or soda are consumed by industry in enormous volume. Fine chemicals such as dyes and drugs are greater in variety and more complicated in structures, but are consumed in smaller amounts. The German industry mainly specialized in fine chemicals. These high-tech, high-value products required sophisticated chemistry to design and technical personnel to market. To synthesize novel dyes required advanced chemistry and ample scientific research. The dyes firms were keen on product design, on making dyes for all colors of the rainbow. They were also keen to develop novel marketing techniques that helped their customers to use these sophisticated dyes on fashionable fabrics. However, they were not too keen to improve the efficiency of production processes. They produced thousands of different dyes, but the amount of each dye was small, typically a hundred tons or so. For such small volumes, scaling up was rather easy and could readily be handled by teams of chemists and mechanical engineers. If the production processes they designed were less than maximally efficient, the little waste was easily absorbed in the fat profit margin of high-value products. When they saw opportunities for novel products with high-volume demands, the Germans could mobilize their technical capacity in special projects to develop production processes, which they kept proprietary. This they did for the Haber-Bosch process for synthetic ammonia and fertilizer. But these were singular cases. For their core business of fine chemicals, they did not see the need for developing a discipline dedicated to efficient production processes.
Chemical Engineering socities


Welcome to Future Life

The vital pillars which sustain and support life are:

• Health
• Energy
• Water
• The Environment

The challenge for Chemical Engineers in the 21st century is to protect water supplies and the environment, develop clean energy solutions and end the suffering of the millions affected by incurable diseases. To make our Future Life a better life. It's your world..