Chemical Engineering

What Do Chemical Engineers Do?

It’s not surprising that a lot of students have no idea what a Chemical Engineer does. Many of you may have only heard of this profession through a friend or relative. Before we explain what a Chemical Engineer actually does, let’s take a journey back through time over one hundred years ago…

Toward the end of the late 1800’s, the United States imported simple drugs and dyes largely from Germany, where industrial chemists worked with mechanical engineers to produce the various chemicals used.  The United States also made small quantities of chemicals, explosives, and metals. After World War I began, it was now impossible to import many chemicals from Europe and a chemical industry had to be built in the United States.

Even before the war, at the turn of the century, the idea developed that chemical processes could be broken up into different operations, called unit operations, such as distillation, evaporation, heat transfer,...