Introduction
Contemporary research in any branch of engineering is seen of late to transgress its traditional academic borders to an extent that its relationship to the embryonic beginnings of the field is often unclear. This occurrence is a consequence of the notable strides in fundamental understanding of natural phenomena and its powerfully unifying effect. In this regard, chemical engineering, in view of its empirical roots, has had the most striking advances in the last several decades. The early development of any engineering discipline has been to cater to some selected societal need (or set of needs) served by the formulation of core subjects towards maintaining some territorial integrity. Thus, chemical engineering began naturally by being associated with industrial chemistry, which was the art of producing chemicals for multifarious applications towards meeting diverse societal needs. This beginning is reflected well in the manner in which core chemical engineering progressed from unit processes to unit operations, and further on to the use of chemical kinetics and thermodynamics, the framework of continuum mechanics to study transport processes in fluids, with parallel development of statistical mechanics and molecular theories.
The use of mathematics in chemical engineering climbed precipitously during the fifties, sixties, and seventies in the last century with a healthy influx of analysis particularly in chemical reaction engineering, fluid mechanics, transport phenomena, and the process systems area. Graduate core courses in most chemical engineering departments came to include Transport Phenomena, Thermodynamics, Chemical Reaction Engineering, and Applied Mathematics. Although these core courses have remained about the same over the years, there has occurred some withering of intensity, probably because faculty interests have tended to shift away from areas that benefit directly from such background. Not infrequently, junior faculty in pursuit of greener pastures elsewhere have subconsciously compromised the level at which core courses are taught. These observations cannot be said to be emanating from obscure corners of the profession. They seem largely prevalent viewpoints, often expressed but more often held back. As mentioned earlier, the objective of this article is to provoke discussion, at least to the extent of examining the evolutionary course of the profession. There is the familiar quip of “Chemical Engineering is what chemical engineers do!” Ignoring the “circularity” of this definition, we may inquire into whether or not chemical engineering is served well by such a stance. Arbitrary activity is no one’s objective. Also, the propitiousness of a researcher’s direction will be tempered by the response of the profession at large.
This article seeks to argue for a rationally infinite domain for the creativity of chemical engineers to flourish by formulating inquiries as to whether or not their activity results in some attributes on which we could expect some degree of consensus. While some attributes may not be contested, others could spark debate:
  1. As all research, engineering research must be creative as well as impactful. The focus of most researchers is impact as expressed by citations and, perhaps to a lesser extent, through recognition by a professional arm of the field as awards or keynote invitations to perspective conferences.
  2. Contributions by chemical engineers must display some distinctive traits which must contribute to the solution of a significant problem. In the absence of such traits, the researcher’s message is subsumed into the multitude of contributions in the field of application by researchers more directly connected to the subject. The area of biology, which represents perhaps the most exciting opportunity for chemical engineers to contribute creatively, is a particular case in point. Often, the only response to a question on relevance of the research to chemical engineering has been that the scale of observation is a reactor which does not attract the attention of a biologist. While reactor-scale work is certainly of importance, the contribution derives merit not from the scale of the observed system but from how the reactor is coaxed to work with quantitative use of biological principles.
  3. A traditional chemical engineering audience often views askance research seminars that are stacked with biological facts or hypotheses without a lateral conduit to a clarifying conceptual source in chemical engineering for interpretation.
  4. Another measure that seems important for chemical engineering activity in a different field is its potential to modify or enhance the core. Indeed, this feature is tied to securing core strength towards preserving a more liberal version of “territorial integrity” than before; “more liberal” implying generality rather than insularity. One may inquire into whether or not the contribution of engineers is generating new perspectives by virtue of tools that define the parent discipline, and further if this experience has widened as well as sharpened the tools that were used.
  5. As in all other areas of science and engineering, opportunities abound in chemical engineering for the use of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence methods in dealing with complex systems.
Our deliberations will focus on biology, on which chemical engineering has had a major impact. Not surprisingly, many ChE departments have added “biological” or “biomolecular” engineering to their names. However, we begin with briefly reflecting on the traditional core areas, starting first with applied mathematics and transport phenomena.