Chemical Engineering
Chemical engineering is very much a large scale manufacturing process. Using scientific knowledge the engineers process raw materials and chemicals to produce existing useful new materials as well as create and innovate new materials that can be used in expanding fields of development. The industry of chemical engineering manufactures products in a very wide ranging spectrum of products. These products include organic and inorganic industrial chemicals, fuels, ceramics, petrochemicals, fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, explosives, detergents, fragrances, additives and pharmaceuticals. These are just a few examples of the end product that chemical engineering produces.
Chemical engineering is very much a cost controlled and economically driven process. A chemical engineer can both simplify and complicate reactions for an economic advantage. The processes involved in chemical engineering involve ‘unit operations’ e.g. distillation or filtration. They also use chemical reaction, mass, heat and momentum in different group formations to get the desired result. There are three primary laws in chemical engineering; these are conservation of mass, conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. They also apply other scientific principles of thermodynamics, reaction kinetics and transport phenomena. Modern chemical engineering has become very specialized in the products it seeks to create for fields such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical and military applications. Also science has called upon chemical engineers to work in biology related areas such as mapping the human genome project.