Role of a Chemical Engineer

A chemical engineer "makes by separating". Try http://www.icheme.org/ for more information. It is a broad discipline, overlapping into other engineering specialisms. Try contacting local universities for a course prospectus.

I would suggest that you go to:

www.cheresources.com

and have a good browse to see the sort of things Chemical Engineers get up to

That's the one walking around with a clip board always looking important and busy!

The focus of chemical engineering is on the unitary operations required in any chemical processing and the relationship between them in the whole process.

When we talk about processes, we study all the steps required to go through the transformations required to go from one set of starting materials to the intended end product(s) and therefore the design and operation of the different units of processing that form part of the whole process.

For instance, if you have an oil refinery, the starting material is oil and the intended en products are the many products we know as liquid fuels (aromatics, gas, kerosene, diesel oil, etc.), lubricant oils, solid fractions (asphalts, coke), and many gases.

To transform oil to these end products, a refinery uses many unit operations like heating (boilers, heat exchangers, etc.), distillation, liquid or liquid / solid separations (crystalizers, etc.) , filtration, reactions (reactors) (with catalysts, hydrogenations, cracking, etc.), fluid handling (pumps, blowers, valves, pipes) and many others, while all this units are linked in a continuous process through pipes, tanks, vents, and so on.

The chemistry scientist should develop the basic knowledge about the chemical tranformations and the chemical engineers take this info to design the equipment and the process parameters needed to accomplish the transformations (that is, as an example, designing the kind of a distiller, the size of it, the flow balance, operating requirements, etc.) Then, they forward this info to the mechanical engineers and piping specialists to actually build the equipment and when operational, the chemical engineer takes over the commissing job and eventually, the operation of the plant.

The design of the process also involves the optimization of the process. In a continuous facility, the flow in any part of the plant should be steady and compatible with the previous and the next operation, temperature, pressure and other variables should be appropiate and a control strategy should be developed to monitor and control all the variables. When dealing with chemical reactions, an engineer should take into account the kinetics of the reaction, pressure and temperature, flow balance, residence time in the reactor, and many other factors, to design the unit operation (reaction process accomplished in reactors or pipes). This is very complex and very often requieres the help of many other disciplines (chemists, math specialists, programmers, and so on)

There also are many other competences of a chemical engineer, like performing environmental studies, and designing and operate the plants to deal with pollution, water purification and as many other applications as you can think of, because all of of them have processes where you have physical and chemical transformations.

You mentioned "cost efficiency". Of course, any person dealing with industrial operations should have this in mind all the time, no matter his field of competence. This is also true for chemical engineers and they should always look for the best way to accomplish his goals and get the requested quality at the lowest possible cost and they do this with a careful study of the project in its entirety as they do for every unit operation.

I hope this helps.

Good reply, Mario!

Thanks Mario !

The role of a chemical engineer is to apply the technology of manufacture of chemicals to make a profit for the company/client. Through experience, he/she can develop a process flow diagram and ultimately with the help of other engineering disciplines, the P&IDs (blueprint) required to build such a facility.

At the end of the day, the chemical engineer should be able to say I helped design a facility that produced the desired product(s) and made money for the company.

Most facilities/plants/refineries are divided into units - parts of the plant that are responsible for a particular part of the manufacturing process (i.e. Crude unit/Isomemerization unit/etc.). Each unit works together to process or make the final products for sale from the facility.

Thanks ninat2 !

I have heard that the difference between the work of a chemist and a chemical engineer is that the engineer knows what the result will be.

Or rather, that the chemist doesn't...