Chemical engineering

Mass balances, distillation, reactor design, and process control

What is chemical engineering?

Chemical engineering is the branch of engineering concerned with designing and operating large-scale industrial processes that transform raw materials into useful products, applying the chemistry covered throughout the Chemistry section to real, large-scale manufacturing.

From laboratory to industrial scale

A chemical reaction that works well in a small laboratory flask doesn't automatically work the same way in an industrial plant producing thousands of tons of product. Chemical engineers specialize in scale-up: figuring out how to run the same chemistry reliably, safely, and efficiently at a vastly larger scale, accounting for challenges that simply don't appear at laboratory scale, like ensuring heat and materials are evenly distributed throughout a massive reaction vessel.

Separating and purifying materials

Many industrial processes need to separate a mixture into its individual, purified components, or remove unwanted impurities. Chemical engineers design and operate the large-scale equipment used for this — distillation columns (separating liquids by their different boiling points), filters, and other separation equipment — a large-scale version of the separation principles covered in the Analytical Chemistry article.

Process design and safety

Chemical engineers design entire industrial processes, connecting reactors, separators, pumps, and other equipment into an integrated system, while carefully managing safety, since industrial chemical processes often involve high pressures, high temperatures, or hazardous materials that must be handled with great care.

Why chemical engineering matters

Chemical engineering underlies the large-scale production of fuels, plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and countless other everyday products — nearly every manufactured chemical product a person encounters daily passed through a chemical engineering-designed industrial process at some point in its production.