Colorado State University

http://navier.engr.colostate.edu/whatische/ChEL01Body.html

What is chemical engineering?

Picture a world where penicillin and other antibiotics are rarer and more expensive than the
most precious gems. Picture once-prosperous countries gripped by famine as dwindling
supplies of natural fertilizers become increasingly scarce, and pests devastate what little crops
can be grown. Imagine hospitals where kidney dialysis is so risky that patients opt not to do it;
where open heart surgery requires so much donor blood that only a select few can have it done;
where organ transplants are unheard of because of tissue rejection; and where diabetics rely on
the harvesting of insulin from animals. Imagine serving in the armed forces or in a police
department without a lightweight bulletproof vest. Picture a closet without easy-care, mothproof
synthetics like rayon, nylon, Gortex, and even polyester, or a home without durable, easy-to-
clean carpets. Picture American cities choked with smog and soot from millions of residential
coal furnaces and millions of automobiles without emission controls. Imagine our world wide
web trying to function on vacuum tubes and ferrite core storage for data processing, and a
"personal" computer the size of a bungalow. Imagine paying $40 for a gallon of gasoline—if you
can even find it—and your automobile weighing 3 tons because of the absence of today's
lightweight alloys and high-strength polymers. Picture a home where perishable foods last no
longer than a day, because that's how long it takes the block of ice in your "refrigerator" to melt.

Chemical engineers have made so many important contributions to society, in such a short
span of history, that it is hard to visualize modern life without the large-scale production of
antibiotics and other drugs, fertilizers, agricultural chemicals, physiological-compatible polymers
for biomedical devices, high-strength polymer composites, synthetic fibers and fabrics,
protective coatings, and microelectronic devices. How would our industries function without
environmental control technologies; without processes to design and make semiconductors,
magnetic and optical storage media; and without modern petroleum processing? All these
technologies require the ability to produce specially-designed chemicals—and the materials
based on them—economically and with minimal adverse impact on the environment.
Developing this ability and implementing it on a practical scale is what chemical engineering is
all about.

The products that depend on chemical engineering come from the diverse array of industries
that play a key role in our economy. These industries include the traditional chemical and
petroleum processing industries that dominated chemical engineering for over half of its
existence, but they also include food and beverages, textiles, paper, rubber and plastics,
ceramics, microelectronics, biomedical devices, and a wealth of others. These industries
produce most of the materials from which consumer products are made, as well as the basic
commodities on which our way of life is built. But, chemical engineering is more than a group of
basic industries or a raft of products. As an intellectual discipline it is deeply involved in both
basic and applied research. Chemical engineers bring a unique set of tools and methods to the
study and solution of some of society's most pressing problems.

How it started
Chemical engineering is the newest of the four major engineering disciplines. As recognized
professions, civil and mechanical engineering both predate it by over 100 years. Chemical
engineering arose as a separate, distinct profession somewhat slowly, almost reluctantly,
between the end of the 19th and the early 20th century. Once established, its rise was fast,
however, becoming a well-recognized engineering discipline by the late 1920's. This relatively
late beginning and long adolescence tends to conceal the fact that many procedures and
techniques now considered standard were practiced long before the profession came about.

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The origins of chemical engineering go back even further, to the industrial revolution of the 18th
and 19th century in Europe and the United States, and the changes following the 1848
revolution in France and Germany. In the beginning of the 19th century the art and the science
of chemistry flourished in Germany. A number of pioneering chemists revolutionized the way in
which new chemicals were discovered, synthesized, and marketed. The most prominent of
these was Justus von Liebig, who established a small chemistry laboratory at the University of
Giessen, a tiny town 30 miles north of Frankfurt. Prof. von Liebig's greatest contribution was not
the discovery of revolutionary new compounds; rather, it was his almost unique ability to
educate students who would themselves become famous scientists. And it was the intellectual
descendants of these brilliant chemists who would populate the universities and research
laboratories in the United States and throughout the western world.

Justus von Liebig was the first great educator in chemistry. He promoted chemistry as the central science, trying to
underscore its direct benefit to man in the form of pharmaceuticals.

What made von Liebig and his students different from other chemists of that age was their effort
to apply their fundamental discoveries to the development of specific chemical processes and
products. This scientific approach, striving for the rational and methodical rather than the
empirical and observational, seems like a logical way to explore new areas of technology.
However, "rational and methodical" are often synonymous with "slow and expensive," and the
human tendency to proceed quickly once something is discovered is ofttimes irresistible. The
scientific method espoused in the 1830's and '40's by the chemist von Liebig had a significant
impact on the birth of chemical engineering 50 years later.

An event that also had an direct impact on the birth of chemical engineering was the political
revolution of 1848 that began in France and swept across the Rhine into Germany. The
revolution, which gave central Europe a taste of liberal reform, resulted in the immediate
improvement of work conditions in the industrialized European countries. Industrial workers
demanded shorter work weeks, higher pay, and safe(r) working conditions. These demands led
to a need to revise acceptable industrial processes with an emphasis, albeit primitive, on safer
and more efficient production methods. An important component of workplace safety, taken for
granted today, is that workers will be safer if they actually understand what they're working on.
Back in the mid-1800's, however, technical education, as opposed to scientific education, was
not formalized. At best, students obtained some superficial knowledge of the relevant processes
in chemistry courses. The operation of chemical processing equipment—distillation columns,
filtration units, heat exchangers, boilers, etc.—was taught in technical schools, not universities.
The students at these technical schools were taught how to operate the units, but they learned
very little of the theory behind the working of the units.

During the second and third quarters of the 19th century the chemical processing industry
followed an unvarying formula: a university-trained chemist discovered wonder compound X, or
a new route for the synthesis of already-discovered compound X; a team of mechanical
engineers designed and built the plant to produce large quantities (maybe hundreds of pounds
per day or week) of compound X; factory workers with rudimentary training ran the equipment in

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the plant. When compound X was easy to synthesize this formula worked well, but in the latter
half of the 19th century chemists were discovering, synthesizing, and otherwise stumbling upon
new compounds that were difficult enough to make in milligram quantities, let alone tens or
hundreds of pounds at a time. Requiring mechanical engineers, who at the time received no
chemistry education, to design equipment for the large-scale production of increasingly complex
chemicals and compounds became more than impractical; by the 1880's it was apparent that, if
the societal contributions of organic and inorganic chemistry were to keep pace with other areas
of science, something had to change in the transition from the laboratory to the mass market.

Emergence as a discipline
Although many of the amazing advances in chemical manufacture were taking place in central
Europe, France and Germany in particular, it was in the United Kingdom that the first steps
were taken for formalize an education in "chemical engineering." In 1887, an unknown industrial
inspector from Manchester, England, George E. Davis decided to transfer his vast knowledge
from his years of inspecting chemical plants in the industrial region of England to the classroom.
In the fall of 1887 he gave a series of 12 lectures, later published in the Chemical Trade
Journal.

George E. Davis taught the first chemical engineering course. It was given in Manchester, England in 1887.

The material in the course was very empirical, that is, based on observation rather than theory,
but it had a definite advantage in that, at last, an individual had put onto paper a series of
articles on the operation of some of the most important (and complicated) chemical processes
of those days. The teaching of chemical plant operation later became known as unit operations,
a phrase coined in 1915 that survives to this day, because Davis' lectures covered the operation
of the units, or individual pieces of equipment, that made up a chemical plant.

However, despite all of the activity in France and Germany, and despite all of George Davis'
attempts to formalize the teaching of unit operations in the U.K., even with his publication of one
of the first textbooks on chemical engineering in 1901 (A Handbook of Chemical Engineering), it
was in none of these three countries that chemical engineering emerged as a discipline. There
are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is simply that, although George Davis
aggressively promoted his book and the concept of chemical engineering as a separate
profession, his impact was minuscule. Basically, no one listened to him. This was truly
unfortunate—not just for George Davis of course—because he was the first to recognize that
the subject of unit operations should be developed and analyzed as a whole rather than as a set
of individual operations. The time was ripe for this unit operations philosophy to emerge, and
appropriately enough, it happened in the United States, which was well on its way to becoming
the world's technological leader.

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At the end of the 19th century the competition between the U.K., France, Germany, and the
United States for industrial chemicals had become fierce. Only one year after Davis' 1887
lectures in Manchester, Professor Lewis M. Norton of the Chemistry Department at MIT started
teaching a course in chemical engineering (although it wasn't yet called chemical engineering in
the United States). The material in this course was taken predominantly from Norton's notes on
industrial chemical practice in Germany, which at that time had what was arguably the most
advanced chemical process industry in the world.

Prof. Lewis M. Norton of MIT's Chemistry Department introduced chemical engineering to the United States.

When Norton died in 1893 at the age of 39, Professor Frank H. Thorpe, who received his
doctorate in chemistry that same year from the University of Heidelberg, took responsibility for
Norton's course. In 1898 Prof. Thorpe published what may be considered the first textbook in
chemical engineering, Outlines of Industrial Chemistry. The term "industrial chemistry"
appearing for the first time in Thorpe's book was an attempt to broadly describe the industrial
processes applied in the production of chemicals; this phrase would become strongly
associated with chemical engineering over the next 50 years. It was not until radical (i.e.,
fundamental) approaches to the analysis of chemical engineering problems were introduced in
the mid-1950s at the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin that "industrial
chemistry" would be made distinct from the main goals of "chemical engineering."

Although Norton and Thorpe were the pioneers of chemical engineering enthusiasm at MIT, it
was Arthur A. Noyes and later William H. Walker who brought to this discipline the respect it
merited within the engineering curriculum. After a doctorate in chemistry at the University of
Leipzig in 1890, Noyes established a research laboratory in physical chemistry in 1903. William
Walker, who received a doctorate in chemistry in 1892 at the University of Göttingen,
recognized the importance of such a laboratory in chemical research, and in 1908 established a
research laboratory for applied chemistry.

MIT is considered to be the first university in the world to offer a four-year curriculum in chemical
engineering; the first students began this course of study in 1888. However, as a separate
department at MIT, Chemical Engineering did not become independent until 1920. Up to that
time it was in the Division of Applied Chemistry within the Department of Chemistry. In those
early days Walker was the main driving force in the Division, assisted by Warren K. "Doc"
Lewis, who received his doctorate in chemistry in 1908 at the University of Breslau. (By this time
you may have noticed a theme: the people of this era who were to become the best and
brightest chemistry faculty in the United States went over to central Europe, usually Germany,
to get their graduate education. This trend continued through the first quarter of the 20th
century.) In 1913 Noyes left MIT for Southern California, transforming what was then Throop
College to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His strong belief in chemical
engineering as a discipline led to early emphasis of that program at Caltech. Other universities
also followed the example set by MIT. The University of Pennsylvania (1894), Tulane University

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(1894), The University of Michigan (1898), and Tufts University (1898) all created four-year
degree programs in chemical engineering, but always as part of their respective Chemistry
Departments.

Evolution of a profession
The training of chemical engineers was a subject of much debate in the first years of the 20th
century. Milton C. Whitaker, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia strongly believed
that fundamental training in physics, chemistry, and mathematics had to be combined with a
natural inclination towards engineering, together with an acquired knowledge of engineering
methods and practices. In other words, Whitaker felt that hands-on experience was necessary
in the education and training of chemical engineers, and this training had to be based on a
thorough background in the natural sciences. This idea, common in chemical engineering
curricula today, was very controversial back in the early days of the discipline, primarily because
most of the educators were chemists, i.e., scientists, not engineers. Although Whitaker himself
was a chemist by training (Ph.D., 1902), he was one of the earliest "true" chemical engineers,
who believed in the rapid separation of industrial chemistry from chemical engineering. He
passed on his views to his own graduate students, but these few were very much voices in the
wilderness with regard to chemical engineering education.

The establishment of a chemical engineering professional society, the American Institute of

Chemical Engineers (AIChE), in 1908 was intended to legitimize the professions of the
converted chemists who were calling themselves chemical engineers. At this time, however,
students interested in chemical engineering were receiving their education within chemistry
departments, and it was by no means unanimous among chemistry faculty that anything other
than pure and applied chemistry should be taught. A number of well-known chemistry
professors used the forum of their own professional society, the American Chemical Society
(ACS) to denounce the inclusion of chemical engineering in the education of chemists. It was
felt by these individuals that important technical breakthroughs were already being achieved in
laboratories by researchers without engineering training, so there was no reason to dilute a
student's chemistry education. Today we look back on this view as very myopic, because
advances in the laboratory don't automatically translate to the production or manufacturing
facilities, and understanding the process of making a material is different from understanding
the properties of the material itself; the missing link between the lab and the plant is
engineering. Whitaker tried many times to point this out, but his arguments fell on disbelieving
ears. As a result, by the time AIChE was formed in 1908, 500 chemical engineers had
graduated in the United States, but only 40 were willing to join a professional society that
seemed to fly in the face of the real chemistry society, ACS. (All 500 of these chemical
engineers held bachelor of science or bachelor of engineering degrees. It wasn't until 1924 that
the first Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering were awarded, at MIT.)

Thus, from its inception in 1888, to the introduction of several innovations in 1923, chemical
engineering education primarily consisted of the study of industrial chemistry, which amounted
to learning the sequences of steps in chemical manufacture. This approach did not allow much
time for any in-depth discussion of the scientific principles involved, nor did it allow students to
recognize the commonality of the underlying physics among the different types of chemical
processes. It was the "introduction" of formal unit operations education during the 1920's (more
than 30 years after George E. Davis first proposed the idea over in the U.K.) by Walker, Lewis,
and McAdams at MIT that marked the beginning of America's distinctive system of chemical
engineering education.

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 Professor William Walker of MIT changed the way chemical engineering was taught.

Not coincidentally, this "new era" of chemical engineering occurred after the establishment of
independent chemical engineering departments in American universities. During the following
three decades—up through the mid 1950s—the development of the science of chemical
engineering came about through the application of physical chemistry to material and energy
balances (which are based on straightforward, fundamental concepts of mass and energy
conservation), to thermodynamics, and to rates of chemical reactions in industrial processes.
This unit operations approach to chemical engineering education was refined and strengthened
over the years, but its central theme didn't vary.

It wasn't until 1955 that a second important change came to chemical engineering, although its
impact was felt within all engineering disciplines. In 1952 the American Society for Engineering
Education (ASEE) appointed a Committee on Evaluation of Engineering Education, with the
goal to evaluate the current state of engineering education and suggest new approaches to the
teaching of engineering. When the Committee's report was released in 1955 a long chapter in
the history of engineering education had closed. The report was only 36 pages long. It was
deferential to the old tradition but firm in its recommendations to the new generation of
engineers:

The objective in engineering curricula will not be achieved by repair of patchwork curricula. It
requires complete reconstruction of curricula

Some attention to engineering art and practice is necessary, but its high purpose is to illuminate
the engineering science, analysis or design, rather than to teach the art as engineering
methodology.

It is the responsibility of the engineer to recognize those new developments in science and
technology that have significant potentialities in engineering. Moreover, the rate at which new
scientific knowledge will be translated into engineering practice depends, in large measure, upon
the engineer's capacity to understand the new science as it develops.

Fortunately, some things do not change. Reactions, stresses, and deflections will still occur, and
they will have to be calculated. Electrical currents and fields will following unchanging laws.
Energy transformation, thermodynamics, and heat flow will be as important to the next generation
of engineers as to the present one. Solids, fluids, and gases will continue to be handled, and their
dynamics and chemical behavior will have to be understood. The special properties of materials
as dependent upon their internal structure will be even more important to engineers a generation
hence than they are today. These studies encompass the solid, unshifting foundation of
engineering science upon which the engineering curriculum can be built with assurance and
conviction.

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It is interesting that, although the words above were written to include the four principal
engineering disciplines—chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical—much of what is said
applies directly to the studies and practice of chemical engineers.

The central theme of the ASEE Committee's report had been taken to heart by five professors—
two at the University of Minnesota and three at the University of Wisconsin—several years
before the ASEE Committee had published its report. In 1951, Neal Amundson, then an
associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, became head of the
Department. Educated as both a chemical engineer and a mathematician, Amundson realized
that further insight into chemical engineering problems lay in the analysis of chemical processes
and phenomena based on a fundamental understanding of these problems.

He used his expertise in applied mathematics, and later, computers, to solve increasingly
difficult chemical engineering problems. In 1955, Amundson met a brilliant applied
mathematician, Rutherford "Gus" Aris, at Cambridge University in England, and convinced him
to turn his attention to the complex problems in chemical engineering that were beginning to
interest Amundson himself. To someone of Aris' intellect, the lack of a chemical engineering
education was a minor hindrance, and within a year of meeting Amundson, Rutherford Aris was
a professor of chemical engineering at Minnesota, and the author of the first book on a
fundamental treatment of chemical engineering fluid dynamics (the study of how gases and
liquids flow). Together, Amundson and Aris forged a department of chemical engineering at
Minnesota that is dominant to this day.

Rutherford Aris helped revolutionize the science and analysis of chemical engineering.

Meanwhile, a second major revolution was taking place at the University of Wisconsin.
Professors Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot prepared a set of notes in 1957, based on their
individual research efforts of the previous decade, offering a new approach to the analysis of
chemical engineering unit problems. The main lesson imparted by these three professors is that
there is a strong unifying backbone to seemingly different unit operations, through the
framework of a relatively simple set of equations describing how fluids flow, heat is transported,
and chemical constituents move within a fluid. The necessity for analyzing each unit or piece of
processing equipment separately was removed, allowing students to learn the common features
of this new transport phenomena. The collective teaching of this subject by Profs. Bird, Stewart,
and Lightfoot culminated in a book of the same name, Transport Phenomena, published in
1960. It is a tribute to their foresight and collective wisdom that this text has been a staple of
most chemical engineering programs for over 40 years; and it was not until 2002 that the
authors found it necessary to bring out a revised version as a second edition.

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Many textbooks have been written on the basic areas of chemical engineering—chemical
reaction kinetics and reactor design, thermodynamics, transport phenomena, unit operations,
and control theory—in the 45 years following ASEE's report, and these all follow the philosophy
espoused in the report and put into action by the pioneering chemical engineering educators of
the 1950s.

Diverse career paths

We've seen how chemical engineering emerged as a separate profession and the philosophies
behind chemical engineering education throughout the 20th century. Now we need to look at the
central issue: what do chemical engineers do with their degrees? What jobs are open to
chemical engineers? This has already been alluded to in the discussion at the beginning of this
section, but now we'll take a somewhat closer look.

For more than 80 years of the profession's existence, up to approximately 1980, this question
was easy to answer. Overwhelmingly, a person with a chemical engineering degree would go to
work in the petroleum, chemical, or food processing industries. To be sure, there were important
exceptions to this sweeping statement. For example, Andy Grove earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.
degrees in chemical engineering before heading off to found Intel. But by and large, before
1980 if you graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering you worked to turn
crude oil, oil shale, and coal into useful fuels, lubricants, and paving materials; or you took
petroleum-derived compounds and turned them into useful herbicides, pesticides, plastics, and
synthetic fabrics; or you helped put mass quantities of foodstuffs on America's shelves. These
all have been, and continue to be extremely important segments of the overall manufacturing
industry, and the need for chemical engineers in these fields will never disappear.

Over the past 20 years, however, more professional doors have been opened to chemical
engineers. During the 1970's, gifted educators and laboratory researchers recognized that
chemical engineers had much to contribute to disciples outside of traditional chemical
engineering practice, i.e., petroleum, chemicals, and food. Areas such as biochemical and
biomedical sciences, polymer science, microelectronics fabrication, environmental engineering,
meteorology, and microbiology all became fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration. The
impetus for these collaborations was provided in large part by the National Science Foundation,
which recognized the importance of interdisciplinary education and research. Faculty brought
more and more of their interdisciplinary research into the chemical engineering curriculum, and
non-mainstream companies recognized the need for chemical engineering graduates in their
workforce.

Today, chemical engineers work in a wide array of different fields, from anthropogenic emission
controls to zeolyte catalyst design. A fascinating feature of chemical engineering at the
beginning of the new millennium is not just the diversity of disciplines, but also the diversity of
scale. Chemical engineers design, build, and analyze processes that range in size from
Angstroms (10-9 inch) to kilometers (104 inch), and in time from picoseconds (10-12 seconds) to
years (104 seconds). These studies include atomic scale computers, immobilized cell reactors,
full-scale chemical plants, and the ocean and atmosphere. All of the different professions
occupied by chemical engineers can be loosely grouped into several broad categories.

 Biotechnology and biomedicine: Advances in molecular biology and medicine have

spawned new technologies and opportunities for chemical engineers. Chemical
engineers have made contributions to human health through the design and
manufacture of artificial organs, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic drugs. In agriculture,
the manufacture of human and veterinary pharmaceuticals, and the scale-up of plant
cell-culture techniques have been the result of breakthroughs by chemical engineers.
Other contributions include the use of genetically engineered systems for the synthesis
of chemicals and the biological treatment of waste. Chemical engineers have
constructed mathematical models of fundamental biological interactions, investigated
interfacial phenomena important to engineering design in living systems, expanded the

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 scope of process engineering into biological systems, and conducted engineering
analyses of whole-organ or whole-body systems.
 Electronic, photonic, and recording materials and devices: The information
technologies on which modern society depends would not be possible without
integrated circuits, optical fibers, magnetic media, devices for electrical interconnection,
and photovoltaics. Chemical processes are the means by which the physical properties
and structural features of these materials and devices are established and tailored.
Chemical engineers now play an important role in process design, optimization, and
control within the electronics industry. Their contributions to this field include process
integration, reactor design and engineering, ultrapurification, materials synthesis and
processing, thin film deposition, mathematical modeling, chemical dynamics, and
process design and control for safety and environmental protection.
 Polymers, ceramics, and composites: Chemical engineers have long been involved
in materials science and engineering. This involvement has steadily increased as new
materials have been developed whose properties depend strong on their microstructure
and processing history. Chemical engineers continue to probe the nature of
microstructure, that is, what the material looks like at the microscopic level, to learn how
it forms in materials and what factors are involved in controlling it. This study has
provided a new fusion between the traditionally separate areas of materials synthesis
and materials processing. Chemical engineers also bring new approaches to the
problems of fabricating and repairing complex materials systems.
 Energy conversion: Energy, minerals, and metals are three basic building blocks of
our technological society. Chemical engineering has long been a part of the
technologies used to convert natural resources into energy and useful products. The
expertise of chemical engineers is needed more than ever to make progress on
problems such as enhanced oil recovery, shale oil production, coal conversion,
electrochemical energy storage, solar power, pollution controls, fuel cells, and turning
waste into a useful source of energy and metals. Significant challenges exist in in
situprocessing, solids processing, developing better separations, finding better
materials for use in energy and mineral applications, minimizing pollutant formation in
combustion processes, and advancing the knowledge base for process design and
scale up.
 Environmental protection, process safety, and hazardous waste management:
Chemical engineers are helping society to face important challenges associated with
the imperative to protect and improve the environment. These challenges include
designing inherently safer and less polluting plants and processes, improving air quality
through research on combustion and factors leading to air pollution, managing
hazardous wastes responsibly, developing new approaches to the study of and control
of pollutants in the environment, and assessing and managing chemical risks to human
health or to the environment.
 Process and control engineering: Computers and computational methods have
advanced to the point where they are having a significant impact on the way in which
chemical engineers can approach problems in design, control, and operations. The
computer's ability to handle more complex mathematics and to permit the exhaustive
solution of detailed models allow chemical engineers to model process physics and
chemistry from the molecular scale to the planet scale, to construct models that
incorporate all relevant phenomena of a process, and to design, control, and optimize
more on the basis of computed theoretical predictions and less on empiricism. A major
chemical engineering contribution to the area of process control has been the design of
control systems that "learn" the process over time. This intelligent process control
approach offers tremendous flexibility for application to new systems and processes.
 Surfaces, interfaces, and microstructures: Surfaces, interfaces, and microstructures
are key to an improved understanding of fluid-solid chemical reactions, electrochemistry
and corrosion, processes for the manufacture of microcircuits, colloids and surfactants,
advanced ceramics and cements, and membranes. Chemical engineers use their
knowledge of thermodynamics, transport phenomena, kinetics, and process modeling to
explore a variety of these research frontiers. These include the development of
molecular-level structure-property relations for guiding the production of materials with
specified physical and chemical surface properties; the development of an improved
understanding of elementary chemical and physical transformations occurring at phase

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 boundaries; and the integration of fundamental knowledge to achieve realistic models of
process operation that can be used for process design and evaluation.

What comes next

Chemical engineers work in too many different fields to possibly cover all of them in the time we
have. In the remaining six topics we will break the discipline into three areas: (1) the
environment, (2) technology, and (3) biological systems. For each of these three areas we'll use
two topics to look in more depth at some important problems, their impact on society, the role of
the chemical engineer, and notable successes and notable failures. Along the way we'll find
that, although these fields appear extremely different from one another, there is a relatively
small set of underlying principles that governing the way things behave. We'll see, for example,
that the process that gives us hazy days in Rocky Mountain National Park also lets us produce
an important paint pigment; and that the basic process for filtering stream water while camping
is the same as that used to help kidney patients undergo dialysis; and that the process for
detecting the presence of a skunk is the same as that which allows a campfire to burn; and that
the same process that allows us to put a very thin coating of gold on a cheap ring allows us to
produce state of the art semiconductor processors. In short, by recognizing that physical
processes have to obey relatively simple laws, we can turn our attention to systems of ever-
increasing complexity, and in doing so, address issues of foremost importance to society.

Bibliography
For anyone interested in reading more about the history of chemical engineering's birth,
evolution, and rise, there are several authoritative books on the subject.

1. J.-C. Guedon, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in

Chemistry Series 190, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
2. D.C. Freshwater, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances
in Chemistry Series 190, p. 97, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
3. G. Astarita, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in
Chemistry Series 190, p. 205, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
4. J.T. Davies, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in
Chemistry Series 190, p. 15, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
5. H.C. Weber, The Improbable Achievement: Chemical Engineering at MIT, MIT,
Cambridge, MA (1980).
6. T.S. Reynolds, Seventy-five Years of Progress, American Institute of Chemical
Engineers, New York (1983).
7. O.A. Hougen, Fifty years of Chemical Engineering Education in the United States,
printed by the Tokyo Institute of Technology (1957).
8. A.D. Little, Twenty-five Years of Chemical Engineering Progress, American Institute of
Chemical Engineers, New York (1933).

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