History of chemical engineering

Batch processes are still performed today on higher value products, such as pharmaceutical intermediates, specialty and formulated products such as perfumes and paints, or in food manufacture such as pure maple syrups, where a profit can still be made despite batch methods being slower and inefficient in terms of labour and equipment usage.

The Industrial Revolution led to an unprecedented escalation in demand, both with regard to quantity and quality, for bulk chemicals such as soda ash.

Industrial chemistry was being practiced in the 1800s, and its study at British universities began with the publication by Friedrich Ludwig Knapp, Edmund Ronalds and Thomas Richardson of the important book Chemical Technology in 1848.

[2] By the 1880s the engineering elements required to control chemical processes were being recognized as a distinct professional activity.

Arthur Dehon Little is credited with the approach chemical engineers to this day take: process-oriented rather than product-oriented analysis and design.

The concept of unit operations was developed to emphasize the underlying similarity among seemingly different chemical productions.

The latter does contribute to this personality in no small measure, but to design and operate chemical reactors, a knowledge of characteristics such as rate behaviour, thermodynamics, single or multiphase nature, etc.