History

Main article: History of chemical engineering

Chemical engineering emerged upon the development of unit operations, a fundamental
concept of the discipline chemical engineering. Most authors agree that Davis invented unit
operations if not substantially developed it.[6] He gave a series of lectures on unit operations at
the Manchester Technical School (University of Manchester today) in 1887, considered to be
one of the earliest such about chemical engineering.[7] Three years before Davis' lectures, Henry
Edward Armstrong taught a degree course in chemical engineering at the City and Guilds of
London Institute. Armstrong's course "failed simply because its graduates ... were not especially
attractive to employers." Employers of the time would have rather hired chemists
and mechanical engineers.[3] Courses in chemical engineering offered by Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, Owen's
College in Manchester, England and University College London suffered under similar
circumstances.[8]
Starting from 1888,[9] Lewis M. Norton taught at MIT the first chemical engineering course in the
United States. Norton's course was contemporaneous and essentially similar with Armstrong's
course. Both courses, however, simply merged chemistry and engineering subjects. "Its
practitioners had difficulty convincing engineers that they were engineers and chemists that they
were not simply chemists."[3] Unit operations was introduced into the course by William Hultz
Walker in 1905.[10] By the early 1920s, unit operations became an important aspect of chemical
engineering at MIT and other US universities, as well as at Imperial College London.
[11]
TheAmerican Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), established in 1908, played a key role
in making chemical engineering considered an independent science, and unit operations central
to chemical engineering. For instance, it defined chemical engineering to be a "science of itself,
the basis of which is ... unit operations" in a 1922 report; and with which principle, it had
published a list of academic institutions which offered "satisfactory" chemical engineering
courses.[12] Meanwhile, promoting chemical engineering as a distinct science in Britain lead to
the establishment of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) in 1922.[13] IChemE likewise
helped make unit operations considered essential to the discipline.[14]

New concepts and innovations

By the 1940s, it became clear that unit operations alone was insufficient in developing chemical
reactors. While the predominance of unit operations in chemical engineering courses in Britain
and the United States continued until the 1960s, transport phenomena started to experience
greater focus.[15] Along with other novel concepts, such process systems engineering (PSE), a
"second paradigm" was defined.[16][17] Transport phenomena gave an analytical approach to
chemical engineering[18] while PSE focused on its synthetic elements, such as control
system and process design.[19] Developments in chemical engineering before and after World
War II were mainly incited by the petrochemical industry,[20] however, advances in other fields
were made as well. Advancements in biochemical engineering in the 1940s, for example, found
application in the pharmaceutical industry, and allowed for the mass production of
various antibiotics, including penicillin and streptomycin.[21] Meanwhile, progress in polymer
science in the 1950s paved way for the "age of plastics".[22]

Safety and hazard developments

Concerns regarding the safety and environmental impact of large-scale chemical manufacturing
facilities were also raised during this period. Silent Spring, published in 1962, alerted its readers
to the harmful effects of DDT, a potent insecticide[citation needed]. The 1974 Flixbokough disaster in
the United Kingdom resulted in 28 deaths, as well as damage to a chemical plant and three
nearby villages[citation needed]. The 1984 Bhopal disaster in India resulted in almost 4,000
deaths[citation needed]. These incidents, along with other incidents, affected the reputation of the trade
as industrial safety and environmental protection were given more focus.[23] In response, the
IChmistry required safety to be part of every degree course that it accredited after 1982. By the
1970s, legislation and monitoring agencies were instituted in various countries, such
as France, Germany, and the United States.[24]

Recent progress
Advancements in computer science found applications designing and managing plants,
simplifying calculations and drawings that previously had to be done manually. The completion
of the Human Genome Project is also seen as a major development, not only advancing
chemical engineering but genetic engineering and genomics as well.[25]Chemical engineering
principles were used to produce DNA sequences in large quantities.[26]

1.2. A Brief History of Chemical Engineering

The chemical engineering profession evolved from the industrial applications of chemistry and separation
science (the study of separating components from mixtures), primarily in the refining and chemical
industry, which we will refer to here as the chemical process industries (CPI). The first high-volume
chemical process was implemented in 1823 in England for the production of soda ash, which was used
for the production of glass and soap. During the same time, advances in organic chemistry led to the
development of chemical processes for producing synthetic dyes from coal for textiles, starting in the
1850s. In the latter half of the 1800s a number of chemical processes were implemented industrially,
primarily in Britain.
And in 1887 a series of lectures on chemical engineering which summarized industrial practice in the
chemical industry was presented in Britain. These lectures stimulated interest in the United States and to
some degree led to the formation of the first chemical engineering curriculum at MIT in 1888. Over the
next 10 to 15 years a number of U.S. universities embraced the field of chemical engineering by offering
fields of study in this area. In 1908, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was formed and since
then has served to promote and represent the interests of the chemical engineering community.
Mechanical engineers understood the mechanical aspects of process operations, including fluid flow and
heat transfer, but they did not have a background in chemistry. On the other hand, chemists understood
chemistry and its ramifications but lacked the process skills. In addition, neither mechanical engineers nor
chemists had backgrounds in separation science, which is critically important to the CPI. In the United
States, a few chemistry departments were training process engineers by offering degrees in industrial
chemistry, and these served as models for other departments as the demand for process engineers in the
CPI began to increase. As industrial chemistry programs grew, they eventually formed separate degreegranting programs as the chemical engineering departments of today.
The acceptance of the horseless carriage, which began commercial production in the 1890s, created a
demand for gasoline, which ultimately fueled exploration for oil. In 1901, a Texas geologist and a mining
engineer led a drilling operation (the drillers were later to be known as wildcatters) that brought in the
Spindletop Well just south of Beaumont, Texas. At the time, Spindletop produced more oil than all of the
other oil wells in the United States. Moreover, a whole generation of wildcatters was born, resulting in a
dramatic increase in the domestic production of crude oil, which created a need for larger-scale, more
modern approaches to crude refining. As a result, a market developed for engineers who could assist in
the design and operation of processing plants for the CPI. The success of oil exploration was to some
degree driven by the demand for gasoline for the automobile industry, but ultimately the success of the oil
exploration and refining industries led to the widespread availability of automobiles to the general
population because of the resulting lower cost of gasoline.
These early industrial chemists/chemical engineers had few analytical tools available to them and largely
depended upon their physical intuition to perform their jobs as process engineers. Slide rules were used
to perform calculations, and by the 1930s and 1940s a number of nomographs were developed to assist
them in the design and operation analysis of processes for the CPI. Nomographs are charts that provide a
concise and convenient means to represent physical property data (e.g., boiling point temperatures or
heat of vaporization) and can also be used to provide simplified solutions of complex equations (e.g.,
pressure drop for flow in a pipe). The computing resources that became available in the 1960s were the
beginnings of the computer-based technology that is commonplace today. For example, since the
1970s computer-aided design (CAD) packages have allowed engineers to design complete processes
by specifying only a minimum amount of information; all the tedious and repetitive calculations are done
by the computer in an extremely short period of time, allowing the design engineer to focus on the task of
developing the best possible process design.
During the period 1960 to1980, the CPI also made the transition from an industry based on innovation, in
which the profitability of a company depended to a large degree on developing new products and new
processing approaches, to a more mature commodity industry, in which the financial success of a

company depended on making products using established technology more efficiently, resulting in less
expensive products.
Globalization of the CPI markets began in the mid-1980s and led to increased competition. At the same
time, developments in computer hardware made it possible to apply process automation (advanced
process control, or APC, and optimization) more easily and reliably than ever before. These automation
projects provided improved product quality while increasing production rates and overall production
efficiency with relatively little capital investment. Because of these economic advantages, APC became
widely accepted by industry over the next 15 years and remains an important factor for most companies
in the CPI.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, new areas came on the scene that took advantage of the fundamental skills
of chemical engineers, including the microelectronics industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the
biotechnology industry, and, more recently, nanotechnology. Clearly, the analytical skills and the process
training made chemical engineers ideal contributors to the development of the production operations for
these industries. In the 1970s, over 80% of graduating chemical engineers took jobs with the CPI industry
and government. By 2000, that number had dropped to 50% because of increases in the number taking
jobs with biotechnology companies, pharmaceutical/health care companies, and microelectronics and
materials companies. The next section addresses the current distribution of jobs for chemical engineers.