Overview of emergence of chemical engineering
Overview of the emergence of chemical engineering
Chemical engineering is the application of the principle of physical sciences, together with the principle of economics and the human relation to a field that pertains directly to process and process equipment in which matter is treated to effect a change in state, energy content, and composition. It involves the production of material at a large scale. The main aim is to produce a useful product from raw materials.
Chemical engineering, which was conceived and raised in the United States and is now recognized as a unique area of technology, has had a long and winding process of growth. The beginnings of the discipline are traced in this history.
Particularly interested as to why and how it developed in the United States rather than Europe, where all of the technical building blocks were also present. The article focuses on the emergence of the chemical engineering concept, and the author only provides broad descriptions of subsequent periods of development and change; no attempt is made to trace the conceptual origins of these later periods.
Any discussion of the history of a dynamic subject like chemical engineering must detect ideas. And how tricky that is to accomplish. The documentation of chemical processes and their different versions and changes, or of chemical equipment with its plethora of new designs, is far easier, except when we try to separate and check the why and who.
Illuminating insights are usually difficult to reconstruct when depicting the origins of ideas. One cannot hope, like anthropologists, to find the single origin of man, or decide, like ornithologists, that the reptile is the forerunner of the bird, or even have a choice of even two appearances similar in nature to scientists who are unsure of if everything began with God or a big bang—and aren't comfortable with the possibility that they were both. The chemical industry then (or now, depending on your perspective) and chemical engineering now have many, many origins, and chemical engineering of the future will trace its roots back to ideas we cannot imagine now.
So, first and foremost, this talk on the origins of chemical engineering is not an attempt to do more than make a few historical observations on a few things that led to modern-day chemical engineering. The second caveat is that I will not attempt to describe our history using processes or machinery. We should create. a few nuanced differences; while chemical engineering is a career path, it is also a list of data, presumptions, and engineering art at the same time. The accumulation is constantly changing, just the same as our minds do, and just as our perceptions of fact but also truth start changing, so does chemical engineering.
Chemical processes and the chemical process industries are regions where chemical engineering is used; however, they aren't yet chemical engineering in and of themselves. While chemical engineers pay particular attention to process equipment, it is not chemical engineering. While it is possible to point to a process or an evaporator that has stood to benefit from chemical engineering, admittedly may intend to give its presence as an economic unit to chemical engineering, one is not justified in viewing them as more than just artifacts of our artifice.
Who was the first to think of a chemical engineer? We have no idea. In my history of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' first 50 years, I mentioned that the term "chemical engineer" first appeared in 1839 in a Glossary of Arts, Producers, and Mines and that it was also used in a published drawing in 1879. So the concept of a chemical engineer existed quite early, only twenty-one years after the establishment in England of the first institute, the Institute of Engineers, in 1818, with culminating organization efforts dating back to 1771. A few more dates to put everything in context:
• 1608: First chemicals exported from the New World
• 1747: The French founded the first Civil Engineering School
• 1818: First Engineering Society, Civil Engineering, in Britain
• 1836: Civil Engineers try to organize in the United States
• 1843: National Engineering Society formed in Holland
• 1847: National Engineering Society formed in Belgium and Germany
• 1848: National Engineering Society formed in France
• 1848: Boston Civil Engineering Society (BSCE) formed (lasted until merged with ASC E in 1974)
• 1852: First National Engineering Society—the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)—formed in the United States.
The culm was undoubtedly able to bend in the way of mechanical engineering because Course X was described as follows in the M.I.T. catalog for 1888-1889:
"This curriculum is designed to meet the needs of trainees who want a general education in mechanical engineering as well as to devote some of their moment to the study of the implementation of chemistry to the arts, particularly those engineering problems relating to the use and start manufacturing of chemical products."
And after that
"The engineering research findings in the chemical engineering degree overlap for even the most part only with the task of the mechanical engineering students."
Chemical engineering arose from several forces, including the need for specialized engineering talent in the industry, the expansion of syllabi through a meaning of what to teach, and the formation of a professional organization to promulgate, publicize, and maintain standards—plus, course, de Tocqueville's insight into the development predispositions of Americans as they sought to establish an innovation center.
The next periods of development in chemical engineering education were as follows:
• 1925-1935: Unit operations were still the dominant theme, but more emphasis was being put on material and energy balances.
• 1935-1945: Applied thermodynamics and process control assumed importance, but the development does not imply necessarily less emphasis on unit operations.
• 1945-1955: Applied chemical kinetics and process design came to the fore. Unit operations lost their uniqueness as it was consolidated into other concepts.
• 1955—: More and more emphasis was placed on engineering science. Rather than emphasizing unit operations, the present trend is to concentrate on the basic engineering sciences; for example, in place of the unit operations of fluid flow, heat transfer, distillation, absorption, drying, and the like, one uses momentum and mass and energy transfer.
Having a look back through the history during which all of these changes occurred, one realizes with a twinge that these advancements were the result of perspectives by chemical engineers facility on the achievements of other chemical engineers, and that, for the most part, their commitments have been documenting mostly in technical imagery, while the human qualities of these teachers, engineers, and researchers have been maintained as sensations, adoringly maintained, only in the minds of these teachers, engineers, and researchers. We primarily need to organize more programs honoring those who will be remembered as an ancient world to be praised in the year 2000.
Literature Cited
- Van Antwerpen, F. J. "Hougen, Olaf Andreas, His Impact on Chemical Engineering: A Retrospective," to be published.
- Literature Cited 1. Van Antwerpen, F. J. "Hougen, Olaf Andreas, His Impact on Chemical Engineering: A Retrospective," to be published.
- Lewis, W. K. AIChE Symp. Ser. 1959, 55 (26), 1,3
- Olsen, J. C. AIChE Trans. 1932, 28, 2
- Lewis, W. K. "Report of the Committee of Chemical Engineering Education of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers," 1972, p. 5.
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