Chemical engineering at crossroads

Krishnaswamy Nandakumar; Mayank Tyagi; Ye Xu; Kalliat T. Valsaraj; Jyeshtharaj B. Joshi

doi:10.1002/cjce.24506

Chemical engineering at crossroads

Krishnaswamy Nandakumar^*, Mayank Tyagi, Ye Xu, Kalliat T. Valsaraj, Jyeshtharaj B. Joshi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Through periodic introspection and assessment, the chemical engineering field has developed a mature undergraduate curriculum built on a strong science background in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. This brings a unique set of skills in transport, reaction engineering, and thermodynamics, coupled with suitable process systems engineering and process design courses, to supply well-trained engineers to a vast array of process manufacturing facilities. These facilities produce basic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, petrochemicals, food and agricultural products, minerals, and materials. While this maturity has served existing industries well, we argue that the chemical engineering field is at crossroads between managing the curriculum of undergraduate and graduate education to supply the needs of established industries while creating innovators for emerging industries. While this is a great opportunity for yet another introspection, we caution that the inadvertent cannibalization of the field must be avoided. We do argue in favour of adding a biology sequence and a computational science sequence to the core at the undergraduate level in a related perspective article.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2011-2027
Number of pages	17
Journal	Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering
Volume	100
Issue number	9
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1002/cjce.24506
State	Published - Sep 2022
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

computational chemistry
computational fluid dynamics
energy
environment
modelling and simulation

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title = "Chemical engineering at crossroads",

abstract = "Through periodic introspection and assessment, the chemical engineering field has developed a mature undergraduate curriculum built on a strong science background in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. This brings a unique set of skills in transport, reaction engineering, and thermodynamics, coupled with suitable process systems engineering and process design courses, to supply well-trained engineers to a vast array of process manufacturing facilities. These facilities produce basic chemicals, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, petrochemicals, food and agricultural products, minerals, and materials. While this maturity has served existing industries well, we argue that the chemical engineering field is at crossroads between managing the curriculum of undergraduate and graduate education to supply the needs of established industries while creating innovators for emerging industries. While this is a great opportunity for yet another introspection, we caution that the inadvertent cannibalization of the field must be avoided. We do argue in favour of adding a biology sequence and a computational science sequence to the core at the undergraduate level in a related perspective article.",

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AU - Xu, Ye

AU - Valsaraj, Kalliat T.

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KW - computational fluid dynamics

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Chemical engineering at crossroads

Abstract

Keywords

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