Grade 7-12
Welcome those who are interested in chemical engineering as a potential career path. We are hoping you can understand more about what chemical engineering is so that you can make informed decisions about your future career.
There are 4 main subjects that are the backbone of a chemical engineering degree.
Thermodynamics - deals with heat, work, and temperature and their relation to energy
Heat and Mass Transport - deals with how masses move and how heat is transferred
Kinetics - deals with how fast and to what extent reactions occur
Controls - how to manage and simulate unstable processes with technology
It is the role of the chemical engineer to fully understand the process they are running which is why chemical engineers find themselves doing a lot of mass and energy balances. A chemical engineer can track exactly how things move through a system and approximate what energy influences the material is under. They can predict if a particular reaction is favorable and how fast it will take.
Let me use macaroni and cheese as an example. The reactants of mac and cheese are macaroni noodles and cheese (lets ignore the butter and milk for now). They come together in a reactor. In this case the reactor would be the pot the mac and cheese was made in. In the reactor, heat is applied to change the phase of the cheese.
If you are making mac and cheese for yourself, you are doing a small scale reaction. But what if you were making mac and cheese for the whole country? You would need a large mixing bowl which in industry is called a tank or a reactor. You could add a 1000 lbs of noodles and a 1000 lbs of cheese, however, this reaction is going to be different from the original small scale reaction and many more things could go wrong. For example, what if the cheese doesn't get properly mixed in with the macaroni? If a dried out cheese is being used, what if that dust is a safety hazard and could cause a potential explosion? Because a thick material can not flow through pipes, what is the best way to extract the mac and cheese due to the change in viscosity? These are some examples of questions that a chemical engineer would ask themselves if they were in this situation.
In reality, there are a lot of industries chemical engineers work in. See the figure below for a list of some of those industries (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-chemical-engineering-so-ignored).
In addition, the salary statistics are shown in the figure below. Note: more info can be found at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/chemical-engineers.htm#tab-2
We hope that this information has been helpful. Feel free to watch and participate in the experiments provided to get a sense of some fun applications of chemical engineering.
Experiments
- Lichtenberg Figures
- Home Forging/Casting
- Vacuum Chamber
- Potato Cannon