The Chemical Engineering Evolution: What Comes Next?

By Armstrong, Robert C

Over the past 40 years, the discipline of chemical engineering has undergone dramatic changes. We are no longer a discipline largely coupled to a single industry, namely the petrochemical industry. Rather, graduates go to a wide variety of industries, including chemicals, fuels, electronics, food and consumer products, materials, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Moreover, the character of the chemical industry has changed significantly, particularly in recent years. The chemical industry today is very much a global enterprise; companies have been reshaped by a series of mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs; some major chemical companies have become life-science companies and spun off their chemical units; and the time to market for new products has been significantly shortened.

Similarly, the chemical engineering research enterprise has exploded over the past 40 years, both in dollar volume and breadth. The exciting research opportunities we explore today as a discipline were well illustrated in the "Future of Chemical Engineering Research" sessions at the 2004 AlChE Annual Meeting. Notable shifts in research over this period include much more biologically related research and a much stronger molecular perspective.

Over these same 40 years, the undergraduate curriculum in chemical engineering has remained nearly unchanged. From 1905 to 1965, the curriculum was very dynamic with significant changes in each decade. By 1965, we’d developed a curriculum for undergraduates that is very nearly the same as today’s. Why? It is possible that after 60 years of hard work on the curriculum, the discipline has arrived at a more or less timeless implementation. But this seems hard to believe in the face of all of the change that took place outside the curriculum. On the other hand, it’s possible that we’ve simply not paid the attention we should to curriculum development. This is what I believe has happened.

The period has seen enormous growth in federal research funding in universities, and this growth is reflected in the large number of doctoral research programs in chemical engineering around the country. This research has created valuable intellectual growth in our community, but it takes an enormous fraction of the time of our faculty members just to keep the research engine running, with grant proposals, contractor meetings, review panels, annual reports, etc. The price has been neglect of curricular content and a widening gap between the research done and the content taught to undergraduates.

The opportunities for chemical engineering today are great. We hold a rather unique position at the interlace between molecular sciences and engineering, and this affords us many opportunities in a broad range of technologies where chemical engineering meets other science and engineering fields. This image of chemical engineering creates a number of tensions in our curriculum. There is a strong outward pull on our curriculum toward the many disciplines with which we interact at the interfaces, such as nanomatehals. semiconductors and biotechnology. The opportunity to teach our students more about these particular areas of technology is exciting educationally, but it does tend to have a fragmenting effect on the discipline.

Opposing the strong outward pull is an equally compelling need to look inward at the core of chemical engineering. Some departments have dealt with this tension by developing curriculum tracks in specialized areas. Students begin by taking a common core in chemical engineering and then specialize in a number of technology areas, e.g., biotechnology. An alternative approach, proposed here, is to refocus on the core content of chemical engineering. Thinking clearly about what constitutes the core of chemical engineering that will make future graduates key contributors in interdisciplinary problems is essential. It’s important to remember that the current core was developed when chemical engineering was dominated by the intersection of chemistry and mechanical engineering. The broad range of applications of chemical engineering can be included in the curriculum by way of examples, problems, case studies, and laboratories. In this way, we maintain a common education for all chemical engineers that demonstrate the versatility of the degree to all of our students.

ROBERT C. ARMSTRONG

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

ROBERT C. ARMSTRONG is the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Room 66-342, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139; Phone: (617) 253-4581; fan: (617) 258-8992; Email: rca@mit.edu; Websife; http://web.mit.edu/ armstronggroup).

Copyright American Institute of Chemical Engineers Jan 2007