Chemical Engineering

Name:
Chemical Engineering
Detailed information:
That branch of engineering concerned with the production of bulk materials from basic raw materials by large-scale application of chemical reactions worked out in a laboratory. The unit operations of chemical engineering are those common to all chemical processing: fluid flow, heat transfer, filtration, evaporation, distillation, drying, mixing, adsorption, solvent extraction, and gas absorption, based on the fundamentals involved in every technical problem in chemical engineering: conservation, equilibrium, kinetics, and control. Conservation involves the laws of the conservation of matter and energy. The limits of any chemical process are established by its equilibrium conditions. The principles underlying the equilibrium concept (the law of mass action) are of fundamental importance (see Chemical Laws). Kinetics means time-dependent processes or rate processes (momentum, thermal, mass transfer, and chemical kinetics). Control involves either the systems approach or feedback or closed-loop methods, as well as considerations of the stability of the system.See Equilibrium Constant; Stoichiometry; Kinetics, Chemical.