History of chemical

engineering

Chemical engineering is a discipline that

was developed out of those practicing
"industrial chemistry" in the late 19th
century. Before the Industrial Revolution
(18th century), industrial chemicals and
other consumer products such as soap
were mainly produced through batch
processing. Batch processing is labour-
intensive and individuals mix
predetermined amounts of ingredients in a
vessel, heat, cool or pressurize the mixture
for a predetermined length of time. The
product may then be isolated, purified and
tested to achieve a saleable product.
Batch processes are still performed today
on higher value products, such as
pharmaceutical intermediates, speciality
and formulated products such as
perfumes and paints, or in food
manufacture such as pure maple syrups,
where a profit can still be made despite
batch methods being slower and
inefficient in terms of labour and
equipment usage. Due to the application
of Chemical Engineering techniques
during manufacturing process
development, larger volume chemicals are
now produced through a continuous
"assembly line" chemical processes. The
Industrial Revolution was when a shift
from batch to more continuous processing
began to occur. Today commodity
chemicals and petrochemicals are
predominantly made using continuous
manufacturing processes whereas
speciality chemicals, fine chemicals and
pharmaceuticals are made using batch
processes.

Origin
The Industrial Revolution led to an
unprecedented escalation in demand, both
with regard to quantity and quality, for bulk
chemicals such as soda ash.[1] This meant
two things: one, the size of the activity and
the efficiency of operation had to be
enlarged, and two, serious alternatives to
batch processing, such as continuous
operation, had to be examined.

The first chemical engineer

Industrial chemistry was being practiced in
the 1800s, and its study at British
universities began with the publication by
Friedrich Ludwig Knapp, Edmund Ronalds
and Thomas Richardson of the important
book Chemical Technology in 1848.[2] By
the 1880s the engineering elements
required to control chemical processes
were being recognized as a distinct
professional activity. Chemical engineering
was first established as a profession in the
United Kingdom after the first chemical
engineering course was given at the
University of Manchester in 1887 by
George E. Davis in the form of twelve
lectures covering various aspects of
industrial chemical practice.[3] As a
consequence George E. Davis is regarded
as the world's first chemical engineer.
Today, chemical engineering is a highly
regarded profession. Chemical engineers
with experience can become licensed
Professional Engineers in the United
States, aided by the National Society of
Professional Engineers, or gain
"Chartered" chemical-engineer status
through the UK-based Institution of
Chemical Engineers.

Professional associations
In 1880, the first attempt was made to
form a Society of Chemical Engineers in
London. This eventually resulted in the
formation of the Society of Chemical
Industry in 1881. The American Institute of
Chemical Engineers (AIChE) was founded
in 1908, and the UK Institution of Chemical
Engineers (IChemE) in 1922.[4] These both
now have substantial international
membership. Some other countries now
have chemical engineering societies or
sections within chemical or engineering
societies, but the AIChE, IChemE and IiChE
remain the major ones in numbers and
international spread: they are both open to
suitably qualified professionals or
students of chemical engineering
anywhere in the world.

Definitions
 This section does not cite any sources.
Learn more

For the other established branches of

engineering, there were ready associations
in the public's mind: Mechanical
Engineering meant machines, Electrical
Engineering meant circuitry, and Civil
Engineering meant structures. Chemical
engineering came to mean chemicals
production.

Unit operation …

Arthur Dehon Little is credited with the

approach chemical engineers to this day
take: process-oriented rather than product-
oriented analysis and design. The concept
of unit operations was developed to
emphasize the underlying similarity
among seemingly different chemical
productions. For example, the principles
are the same whether one is concerned
about separating alcohol from water in a
fermenter, or separating gasoline from
diesel in a refinery, as long as the basis of
separation is generation of a vapor of a
different composition from the liquid.
Therefore, such separation processes can
be studied together as a unit operation, in
this case called distillation.
Unit processes …

In the early part of the last century, a

parallel concept called Unit Processes was
used to classify reactive processes. Thus
oxidations, reductions, alkylations, etc.
formed separate unit processes and were
studied as such. This was natural
considering the close affinity of chemical
engineering to industrial chemistry at its
inception. Gradually however, the subject
of chemical reaction engineering has
largely replaced the unit process concept.
This subject looks at the entire body of
chemical reactions as having a personality
of its own, independent of the particular
chemical species or chemical bonds
involved. The latter does contribute to this
personality in no small measure, but to
design and operate chemical reactors, a
knowledge of characteristics such as rate
behaviour, thermodynamics, single or
multiphase nature, etc. are more
important. The emergence of chemical
reaction engineering as a discipline
signaled the severance of the umbilical
cord connecting chemical engineering to
industrial chemistry and cemented the
unique character of the discipline.

See also
 George E. Davis
Chemical Industry
Chemical plant
commodity chemicals
speciality chemicals
fine chemicals
Institution of Chemical Engineers
Northeast of England Process Industry
Cluster

References
1. Kostick, Dennis (1998). "The origin of
the U.S. natural and synthetic soda
ash industries" (PDF). Wyoming State
Geological Survey Public Information
 Circular. 39. Retrieved 19 February
2018.
2. Ronalds, B.F. (2019). "Bringing
Together Academic and Industrial
Chemistry: Edmund Ronalds'
Contribution". Substantia. 3 (1): 139–
152.
3. Delgass; et al. "Seventy-Five Years of
Chemical Engineering" . Purdue
University. Retrieved 13 August 2013.
4. W. F. Furter (1980) A Century of
Chemical Engineering, Plenum Press
(NY & London) ISBN 0-306-40895-3

Further reading
 William Furter (ed) (1982) A Century of
Chemical Engineering, Plenum Press
(New York) ISBN 0-306-40895-3
Colin Duvall & Sean F. Johnston (2000)
Scaling Up; The Institution of Chemical
Engineers and the Rise of a New
Profession, Kluwer Academic
(Dordrecht, Netherlands) ISBN 0-7923-
6692-1
Bowden, Mary Ellen (1997). Chemical
achievers : the human face of the
chemical sciences . Philadelphia, PA:
Chemical Heritage Foundation.
ISBN 9780941901123.

External links
 "History of ChEn: Struggle for Survival"
"About AIChE" (from www.stevens-
tech.edu)

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