So what the heck is chemical engineering?

So I'm currently a junior studying chemical engineering at the University of Oklahoma and I often find that when I tell people what I studying, they usually act like it sounds impressive or they say they've heard that major is difficult, but I've found very few people actually know what chemical engineers do and thus the purpose of this first post is to create an overview of what chemical engineering is and what chemical engineers do. Chemical engineering isn't as simple to understand from just looking at the name. One might expect a civil engineer to work on bridges, an aeronautical engineer to work on airplanes or Petroleum engineer to work in oil and gas, so one might expect chemical engineers work with chemical and that's a pretty good guess but it's not a complete answer. Just like civil engineering can include working on roads, bridges, buildings, or focusing on maintaining existing structures, Chemical engineering can be pretty varied. Chemical engineering is often synonymous with process engineering and the word process is a better example of what it is chemical engineers often do - they focus on designing and maintaining processes. This could be designing a new distillation column for separating benzene and toluene, or it could be something more common like designing a batch reactor for fermentation in a brewery. 

Chemical engineers study many of the same topics as other engineering students - thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, numerical methods, lots and lots of math, but many of their classes have a heavier focus on process design and engineering. For example, thermodynamics for a mechanical engineer will focus much more on heat transfer and chemical engineering thermodynamics will focus heavily on the chemical reactions involved in that heat transfer. We also take many classes on process design -  these are classes where we learn how to design or optimize process systems and this can have some really practical applications. A solid understanding of heat transfer can be surprisingly useful in day to day life (one of my test had a problem that involved determining the costs of heating and cooling a house in winter and summer by determining the heat loss through the walls and ceiling and then finding the percent time the AC or the heater had to run to maintain a certain temperature in the house). A problem like this may not seem like something many people have to deal with on a daily basis, but understanding heat transfer well can help you determine exactly how much insulation you might need when you're working on remodeling your house. Now much of what we do is very technical (like the heat transfer coefficient of condensation for vertical and horizontal heat exchangers) but that doesn't mean the field should be hard to approach or understand for a new comer. There is value in being able to explain one's field to an outsider who may not have the same technical knowledge and thus the purpose of this blog is to discuss chemical engineering in a way that's accessible for lay people who may not know much about the field but still are interested in learning about it. I plan on creating weekly and occasionally bi-weekly posts that will explain specific examples of chemical engineering in the world today or perhaps discuss how chemical engineering applies to current issues like the water problems in Flint, Michigan. I hope to make the field of chemical engineering a little more approachable and clear to those that might not know much about it. If anyone has any suggestions on topics they'd be interested in, I'd love to hear it!