New Directions for Chemical Engineering (2022) / Chapter Skim
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2 Chemical Engineering Today
2 Chemical Engineering Today
Pages 17-31
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From page 17... ...
Without the invention of catalysts due to the leadership and vision of Karl Ziegler, a chemist, and Giulio Natta, the first chemical engineer to win a Nobel Prize, polyolefins would not exist, and the myriad benefits of plastics would not have been realized. Without the invention of tough, stable polymers by chemical engineers at the DuPont Company, including Roy Plunkett and Stephanie Kwolek, Teflon® and Kevlar® would not have been developed, nor would any of the commercial and medical devices made from those polymers.
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From page 18... ...
The industry is divided roughly into basic chemicals, specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, and consumer products (DHS, 2019)
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From page 19... ...
Their work creatively transforms matter and products into higher-value materials and products using the principles and tools of thermodynamics, transport, kinetics, process control, and process design. Chemical engineering is the only field of engineering that takes advantage of chemical transformations, usually followed by separation and purification, to add value to products.
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From page 20... ...
. Chemical engineering evolved as a profession from the roots of industrial and applied chemistry, which in turn emerged from such ancient chemical processes as fermentation and leather tanning.
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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
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From page 22... ...
Katz to study the use of computers in engineering, which resulted in a seminal 1966 report entitled Computers in Engineering Design Education. Chemical engineering education in general, but more specifically the computationally heavy process control and process design courses, owes much to the vision laid out by Katz in this report.
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From page 23... ...
Space does not allow enumeration of all of the advances in materials and processes that emerged from those laboratories and development efforts, or other important advances in research and product development from the laboratories at 3M, Shell, Universal Oil Products (later Honeywell UOP) , Aramco, Standard Oil Company, Bell Labs, and elsewhere, but they all contributed in a significant and largely defining way to the quality of life enjoyed in the United States.
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From page 24... ...
. The undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum focused on the core fundamentals of thermodynamics, transport phenomena, reactors and kinetics, process control, and process design.
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From page 25... ...
These longer-term and probably irreversible societal and business changes are augmented by a critical need to mitigate climate change resulting from greenhouse gas emissions. The ultimate measure of success in addressing climate change will be reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere while still delivering the energy that society needs.
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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)
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From page 27... ...
Thus, despite a course catalog that appears at first glance to be stuck in the past, the curriculum has been shown to yield graduates with the skills needed to adapt and succeed in the workplace. The hallmark of this continuing success appears to be the ability of chemical engineering graduates to think quantitatively, draw on data to guide the development of predictive models that can be expressed mathematically, and integrate pieces into a welldesigned coherent system.
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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.
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From page 29... ...
On the industrial research front, the linear model of research, development, and commercialization has also been disrupted in the years since the Amundson Report was released. In the past, major companies deployed research and development (R&D)
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From page 30... ...
A comparison of R&D expenditures as a function of total revenue or total chemical sales (Figure 2-3) shows the marked difference between the pharmaceutical industry and the chemical and petroleum industry, respectively.
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From page 31... ...
Thus it is important to continue to educate students in the basic skills of chemical engineering, albeit with examples less reflective of an olefin-based business. At the same time, the field needs to be open to the influx of faculty members and practitioners who have not had a traditional chemical engineering education.
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