What is Chemical Engineering?

The USUAL pamphlet entitled "What is Chemical Engineering?" is a collection of boring generalities and information which no one at your stage of the game could possibly care about.

For instance: Chemical engineering is an important and interesting field, in which the basic principles and techniques of chemistry, physics, and mathematics are applied to industrial chemical manufacturing and processing. Here at NCSU, we have a fine department and a well-rounded curriculum which is designed to provide sufficient preparation for either an industrial career or further study in graduate school. The chemical engineering curriculum begins in the sophomore year with a course in basic stoichiometry, and continues with....We on the faculty are eager to help you in any way we can--feel free to call on any of us at any time. Now, in Figure 1 we see a cutaway view of a typical bubble cap distillation tower, which is a device to...

and so on for ten pages in the same sparkling vein.

Most of these things are true, but all of them are pretty much irrelevant to someone trying to make a career choice. Chemical engineering is important, but so are lots of other fields. We think our department is good, but we're not the only good department in the college. Some of us are very useful people for you to meet now, knowledgeable about prerequisites and career objectives and things like that, while others of us wouldn't begin to know what to do with you if you suddenly materialized in our offices. And if we told you, for example, that in your fifth semester as a potential chemical engineer you would be required to take a course in thermodynamics, your proper reply would be "so what?"

What should we be telling you, then? It might help to tell you exactly what chemical engineering is or what you would most likely do for a living as a chemical engineer. The problem is that we really don't have a good definition of chemical engineering, and we have no idea at all what you will end up doing as a chemical engineer. If you pressed the point, we might ask what kinds of things you would like to do and, when you told us, we would say that you'll probably get to do them if you still feel the same way in four years, which you probably won't.

Incidentally, questions like "What do chemical (and civil and mechanical and electrical) engineers do?" are precisely the kind of questions you should be asking now, and almost certainly aren't. According to our unofficial statistics, 1% of you are in engineering school because you studied the alternatives and concluded that you were born to be engineers, 13% are here because your fathers or somebody had the idea that you should be engineers, 23% because someone told you that engineers earn more money than anyone else, and the remaining 63% because English and history are a drag and pure science and math are much too hard, so what else is there?

You're going to keep doing the same thing, too, if past history is any guide. "I don't like Chemistry 101--I'd better not go into chemical engineering." "Physics 208 is too tough--better forget electrical engineering." Eventually you back into one field or another, go through four years, get a job, and maybe then realize that, while there's nothing about your job that you hate, there's nothing much to like about it, either, and that what you'd really like to be doing is....

Unfortunately, by then it's usually too late: one person in a hundred is sufficiently motivated to switch fields completely after getting out of college. The time to start thinking about what you'd like to do is now, and if you make your decisions on the basis of ow you like one or another of your freshman courses, you're blowing it, and you deserve whatever you get. (Incidentally, Chemistry 101 has almost nothing to do with chemical engineering.)

All right, what do you want to do? You don't know, probably. Let's throw out a few suggestions, then--call it games chemical engineers play.

Do Environmental Problems Concern You?

There are several ways to attack the problem of a pollutant being released into the air, or into a river or a lake. You can (a) treat the pollutant in some way to make it less offensive (a chemical reaction approach), or (b) separate the pollutant from the harmless stuff it's being carried along with and dispose of it separately in a nonpolluting way (a material separation approach), or (c) arrange conditions so that the pollutant is dispersed in such a way that its harmfulness is eliminated or diminished (a transport phenomenological approach). Several branches of engineering deal with one or another of the techniques needed to implement these approaches; chemical engineering deals with all of them.

How about Energy?

In the coming decades, as petroleum and natural gas become less plentiful (and thus more expensive), we will be replacing these fuels with energy sources that we have in abundance--principally coal and (in years to come) shale oil. A great deal of difficult technology is involved here: extracting the fuel from its ore, converting it (if it is a solid) to a liquid or gas; treating it to remove sulfur and other potential pollutants; transporting it to wherever it is to be used; burning it and utilizing the heat released to drive an engine or an electrical generator; cleaning up the combustion products before releasing them into the environment; and somehow or other making the whole thing economical. Chemical engineers are involved with every one of these problems; they will also play a part in investigating potential long-range solutions to the energy crisis, such as harnessing the energy of the sun, wind, and tides.

Interested in the Human Body?

Become an engineer, specializing in biomedical applications. Things like the heart, lungs, kidneys, and blood circulation are biological analogs of the kinds of things chemical engineers have always dealt with, and chemical engineers have consequently been among the leaders in the development of artificial organs and physiological systems. The applications of engineering principles to the design of a device to remove wastes from blood when the kidneys fail, for example, is something for which a chemical engineer is trained and a physician is not.

Management, Finance, Law?

As a chemical engineer, you may move into production, research, or design supervision, or go to work for a firm that specializes in chemical industry venture appraisal, or go into patent law.

Science and Mathematics?

Some chemical engineers are indistinguishable from pure scientists and applied mathematicians, except that the engineers are a little more likely to wonder occasionally about the short-range applicability of what they are doing.

And last, but not least...

far from least, you can go to work in one of many capacities within the chemical (or petroleum or plastics or pulp and paper or textile) industry, which is what all chemical engineers used to do and most still do, although there are many excellent chemical engineers who became ill within 20 miles of a chemical plant, downwind at any rate.

Since most chemical engineers end up in industry, it might be instructive to consider industrial chemical engineering games in a little more detail. It all starts in a laboratory, when an enterprising research and development engineer discovers a reaction that gives you something valuable from something not as valuable. Let's say our engineer discovers that if you combine a grain, say corn, a sugar, and a bacterial agent, say yeast, a reaction called fermentation occurs, and if you boil the resulting mixture in a device known as a distillation column, or still, the part that comes off as vapor has some very interesting properties.

Next comes an engineer who lays out a stepwise procedure for carrying out the new process on a large scale. He might propose something like taking the corn, sugar, and yeast, and allowing them to ferment in a tank for 7 to 14 days; the tank should be kept in a heavily secluded area, since the reaction is easily disturbed by outside agents. The wet mash is then put through a separation unit, the liquid skimmed off the top is boiled in a still, and the vapor is condensed in a cooling coil. The liquid that comes out is known as the raw product (which is no exaggeration at all). The product may be sold as it is, or subjected to an adsorption step on charcoal beds to increase its purity, so that it may be sold at a higher price. The creative process engineer also notes that the economics of the process may be improved by taking the mash residue and selling it as hog feed instead of throwing it away.

This is an excellent example of a chemical engineering problem. You have to deal with the movement of material from one unit to another (fluid flow), supplying heat to a still (heat transfer), chemical reactions (unit processes), separation processes such as skimming, distillation, and adsorption (unit operations), quality control, economics, etc. This is not to say that someone who isn't a chemical engineer can't do things like this--it's just much easier if you are one. The same applies to everything else mentioned here: a chemist or a physician who is particularly ambitious may be able to teach himself enough to be able to design a heart-lung device, but the things that a person would need to know are the things chemical engineers are taught as a matter of course.

Returning to the process, another chemical engineer calculates the size and construction materials of the process units and pipes in the system, and estimates the costs; another trained in market analysis determines whether or not it will pay to do the whole thing; another engineer lays out the plant and supervises its construction; another supervises the plant operation and sees to it that the product (which may also be process equipment or instrumentation) keeps coming, and still another runs the show and becomes rich. Finally, some who are unsuited to any of these functions go into teaching chemical engineering.

In fairness, we should tell you that the path that leads to all these opportunities is not an easy one. You may have heard that chemical engineering is the toughest curriculum in the college, and it well may be. However, for those who make it, the rewards are great. In almost every one of the past 10 or 15 years, the average number of job offers received by chemical engineering graduates has ranked ahead of every other discipline available at NCSU, and there is every indication that this pattern will continue. What does this mean to you? It means choice of employer and geographic location--important factors in your happiness, job satisfaction, future advancement, and your chance to do something significant in your profession. In addition, chemical engineers' starting salaries have been, and are expected to remain, the highest among NCSU graduates.

However, the main factor motivating your choice should not be the starting salary you might get, but the type of work you'd most enjoy doing. Consider once more the variety of activities chemical engineers get involved with, some of which we haven't yet mentioned: chemistry; mathematics; biology; medicine; pollution control; industrial research; academic research; law; finance; weapons development; automation; economics; teaching; inventing; building; producing; selling; supervising people who invent, build, produce and sell; experimentation, theory; and on into the night. If any of these things appeals to you, you might consider chemical engineering as a career and, equally important, if you're still not sure which way you want to go, chemical engineering is probably as good as any other engineering discipline for keeping your options open.