Chemical engineering (redirected from chemical engineer)

chemical engineering: see engineering.

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chemical engineering

Academic discipline and industrial activity concerned with developing processes and designing and operating plants to change materials' physical or chemical states. With roots in the inorganic and coal-based chemical industries of western Europe and the oil-refining industry in North America, it was spurred by the need to supply chemicals and products during the two World Wars. The field includes research, design, construction, operation, sales, and management activities. Chemical engineers must master chemistry (including the nature of chemical reactions, the effects of temperature and pressure on equilibrium, and the effects of catalysts on reaction rates), physics, and mathematics. The engineering aspect, involving fluid flow (see deformation and flow) and heat and mass transfer, is broken down into “unit operations,” including vaporization, distillation, absorption, filtration, extraction, crystallization, agitation and mixing, drying, and size reduction; each is described mathematically, and its principles apply to any material. Chemical engineers work not only in the chemical and oil industries but also in such processing industries as foods, paper, textiles, plastics, nuclear, and biotechnology.

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Chemical engineering

The application of engineering principles to conceive, design, develop, operate, or use processes and products based on chemical and physical phenomena. The chemical engineer is considered an engineering generalist because of a unique ability (among engineers) to understand and exploit chemical change. Drawing on the principles of mathematics, physics, and chemistry and familiar with all forms of matter and energy and their manipulation, the chemical engineer is well suited for working in a wide range of technologies.

Although chemical engineering was conceived primarily in England, it underwent its main development in America, propelled at first by the petroleum and heavy-chemical industries, and later by the petrochemical industry with its production of plastics, synthetic rubber, and synthetic fibers from petroleum and natural-gas starting materials. In the early twentieth century, chemical engineering developed the physical separations such as distillation, absorption, and extraction, in which the principles of mass transfer, fluid dynamics, and heat transfer were combined in equipment design. The chemical and physical aspects of chemical engineering are known as unit processes and unit operations, respectively.

Chemical engineering now is applied in biotechnology, energy, environmental, food processing, microelectronics, and pharmaceutical industries, to name a few. In such industries, chemical engineers work in production, research, design, process and product development, marketing, data processing, sales, and, almost invariably, throughout top management. See Biochemical engineering, Biomedical chemical engineering, Biotechnology, Chemical conversion, Chemical process industry, Unit operations, Unit processes