In this next-to-last post of the series, I take up the fifth reason that I think we are entering a Golden Age of ChE: Our profession’s breadth, linked by common background and problem-solving approaches.
To keep our profession strong, we must understand and embrace both our core expertise and our breadth. Part of this breadth is working with our different branches and with other disciplines to achieve specific and broad goals of society. So, what is ChE and who is a ChE?
ChE is what a ChE does
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Bette Lawler, AIChE’s director of operations, tells me that when she calls about membership renewals, she often hears the comment, “I’m not really doing chemical engineering anymore.” Most often, that turns out to mean that they aren’t doing process engineering!
ChEs do many things in addition to process engineering. To name a few areas, we also bring our skills to bear on R&D, management, finance, business, design, sales, technical service, testing, human resources, education, law, medicine, governing, intelligence services, and space flight.
Chemical engineering is not defined narrowly by the industries we work in, which are remarkably diverse. Oil, gas, and petrochemicals are key sectors for our profession, and the excitement about new opportunities there is high. At the same time, we have long records of achievement in pharma, polymers, food, nuclear energy, environmental control, paper, and packaging. ChEs are also taking leading roles in new areas as diverse as tissue engineering, personalized medicine, nanotechnology, petascale computing, sustainability metrics, and microfluidics.
Ask ChE students what their interests are. You’ll find a wide range. For example, at the AIChE Student Chapter of California State University – Long Beach, students listed water, sustainable manufacturing, medicine, auto racing, business, biofuels, automated environmental-control systems, and microelectronics.
Our core (1): “Molecular science” is our foundation
The core distinction of a engineering disciplines is what branch of science it rests on.
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Ten years ago, Bob Armstrong of MIT led a broadly based effort of academics and industrial practitioners titled “Frontiers of Chemical Engineering Education,” aiming to develop a new framework for the undergraduate curriculum. One of their insights was that each engineering discipline has three aspects: Its core area of science, a systems approach to problem-solving, and their concepts and analytical connectors (see graphic).
Chemistry is the core science of our profession. At the same time, chemistry has broadened to encompass biology and materials so “molecular sciences” is a better description. From that point of view, a definition of chemical engineering is “the profession that applies molecular sciences.”
If you’re doing sales or chemical process control or patent law or tissue engineering, for example, does that definition fit? I think so. Consider the contrasting time scales of ChE vs. electrical-engineering process control: seconds and minutes, vs. milliseconds and microseconds. Tissue engineering is using living cells, but we now understand that biochemical pathways are keys to their viability.
Physics and math and even social sciences of ChE all play vital roles, too. Each engineering discipline is centered on some domain of science, and applied molecular sciences is ours.
This post identifies two distinguishing, common features of ChEs as (1) applying molecular sciences and (2) having a common starting point of tackling problems and projects from a systems perspective that we learned the beginning of our studies. Do you have ideas that would refine or expand that list?