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Pages 17-30

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From page 17...
... Figure 2-1 highlights some of the areas in which chemical engineers have made major contributions. At the same time, however, chemical engineering is also responsible for unintended consequences, such as those resulting from the production of chemicals that will persist in the environment indefinitely, greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, plastic materials that accumulate in landfills and the oceans, and the chemicals of war that have inflicted long-term or permanent damage on humans and the environment.
From page 18...
... Fewer than 10 percent of drugs that make it to clinical trials are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- another contributor to the high costs of these products (BIO, 2011)
From page 19...
... Chemical reactions and reacting systems are central to many transformations. The problems tackled by chemical engineers usually involve time dependence, transport phenomena, and nonequilibrium phenomena and feature many variables.
From page 20...
... Because chemical engineers deal with both molecules and the enormous industrial plants that produce them, their work encompasses a large range of length and time scales, from the nanometer scales of chemical bonds and reactions to the kilometer scales of crude oil (petroleum) refineries, and from nanosecond chemical reactions to batch processes that take hours.
From page 21...
... Lightfoot published the paradigm-shifting textbook Transport Phenomena in 1960. That book transformed chemical engineering by bringing a strong mathematical approach to the unification of treatments of fluid mechanics and heat and mass transfer, both reinforcing and explaining the connections made by Allan P
From page 22...
... 22 New Directions for Chemical Engineering the University of Delaware and the DuPont Company, respectively, in 1946 (Chilton and Colburn J-factor analogy)
From page 23...
... Company. This invention led to the creation of the GE Plastics Business, which grew to be a global business based on major contributions of chemical engineers (Plastics Hall of Fame, 2021)
From page 24...
... In 2021, as this report was being written, the internets of information and things were affecting all aspects of life, 14 billion cell phones were in use worldwide (Statista, 2021) , the human genome was known and could be edited, it was possible to "see" individual atoms, and the use of artificial intelligence and deep machine learning was growing rapidly.
From page 25...
... . In these times of change, chemical engineers also play a central role in advances in many new and important areas, including personalized medicine, the infrastructure needed to produce vaccines for a pandemic, the rapid conversion to an economy based on nonfossil fuels, the need for new materials, and many more.
From page 26...
... TABLE 2-1 Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD Degrees Awarded in the United States between 2008 and 2019 in Chemical Engineering (ChE) , 26 All Engineering (Eng)
From page 27...
... Many have large units devoted to cybersecurity across manufacturing facilities, re search and development, and contractor monitoring. Most of these teams are made up of com puter scientists, but they work closely with chemical engineers who are designing new processes or control systems.
From page 28...
... Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, where many academic chemical engineers find at least some support for their research. Key phrases for funded proposals include "dynamic covalent junctions on block copolymer and network self-assembly," "sustainably derived high-performance nanofiltration membranes," "ultrahigh-resolution magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging for label-free molecular imaging," and "photonic resonator hybrids." Funding of chemical engineers by the National Institutes of Health is of course even further disconnected from the traditional focus of the undergraduate curriculum.
From page 29...
... Chemical Engineering Today 29 FIGURE 2-2 Number of new research projects funded by the National Science Foundation with a single principal investigator (SPI) (light blue; left)
From page 30...
... To fill that gap, startups, innovation incubators, and many other intermediate models have emerged in and near universities, but the bidirectional connection of research and the marketplace is still challenged. The exception is the pharmaceutical industry, where fundamental drug discovery is still carried out.


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