WHAT CHEMICAL ENGINEERS DO FOR A LIVING?

Case

A Chemist in a company’s research and development division has discovered that if he mixes 2 reactants in a certain proportion at an elevated temperature, he obtains a product more valuable than both reactants. The company contemplates manufacturing the product using a process based on this reaction.

What Chemical Engineers can do about this is making analyses and decisions on some of these engineering problems.

1. How to design the reactor where the reaction can be carried out in safely?

2. Where should be the reactants be obtained? Buy them or make them?

3. Should the reactor effluent which contains the products and unconsumed reactants be sold as is, or should the product be separated from the reactants and the latter be sent back to the reactor? How to design the process?

4. Should additional laboratory studies be conducted? What studies?

5. What can possibly go wrong with the process and what can be done if and when it does really happened?

6. Are there waste products that result from the process? Are they potentially harmful if released untreated into the environment? If so, how to treat them?

7. How much does all of this cost? How much can the product be sold for and to whom? How much money will the process net each year? Is it worthwhile? If so, where should the plant be built?

8. Once the plant has been bulit, what procedures should be followed for “start up”?

9. Six months after start up, it happens that the product is not coming out the way it did in the laboratory. What is going wrong?

10. When the process finally starts working perfectly and the next day an order comes down to change the product specification, how can it be done without redesigning the entire process? Why didn’t they think of this before they built the plant?

Source : Felder, Richard M. and Rousseau, Ronald W. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF CHEMICAL PROCESSES, Second Edition.