Becoming an Chemical Engineer
Name: n ameyaw
Date: Around 1993
What exactly do chemical engineers do?
Chemical engineers are employed in a variety of areas. Manufacturing is one
major areas of employment. In that area, a chemical engineer would be
perhaps responsible for procuring/testing/analyzing chemicals used in a
process to determine which chemicals in which amounts would be best for
insuring the safe completion of a process in the most economical and least
environmentally damaging way. In my employment at AT&T Microelectronics,
our chemical engineers are responsible for facilities which use acid etches
(hydrofluoric, phosphoric acids) and chemical cleans (sulfuric peroxides,
etc.) to create films on silicon wafers in the manufacture of integrated
circuits. The cost of these materials am manufactured can be quite high,
perhaps exceeding $500.00 per silicon wafer. It is clear that persons must
be responsible for the safe processing of lots of 50 or 100 wafers as
"overetches" or "missed cleans" could result in compromised yields, and
higher per-unit cost. In a competitive cost business, careful controls must
be placed on these processes. In addition, insuring the safety of personnel
using these facilities must be a primary consideration of the chemical
engineers, but both in terms of physical (touch) safety and also preventing
exposure to these process chemicals by inhalation. The manufacturing
facility itself generates a large quantity of chemical waste in the manufac-
turing of the IC's, and these materials must but be cleaned up for release
to the environment. This includes liquids, solids and gases. I hope this
discussion gives at least one example of chemical engineer's (CE's) work.
I think that is an excellent description.
Of course chemical engineers are also involved in the design of large-scale
synthetic processes, the development of new materials and their character-
ization, and computer modeling of manufacturing processes.
To be a chemical engineer, you must learn a fair amount of chemistry, math
and physics as the foundation...then it is on to lots of thermodynamics and
kinetics. Since the degree is so demanding, in the past the employment
prospects have been pretty excellent. But of course things change.
Chemical engineers might also be concerned with environmental issues (how do
you make sure that a factory does not emit toxic substances? How can we
ensure that we waste as little energy as possible?), or really, any aspect
of chemistry that has an engineering component to it (i.e., a real-world
problem that needs solving).
Click here to return to the Engineering Archives
Update: June 2012