Chemical engineers

**Nikitn** · January 17, 2012, 05:18 AM

anyone knows one/is one? I'm wondering if they get to develop new materials and if so what roles they have and what kind of stuff they do etc.

**Logios** · January 17, 2012, 06:18 AM

I am one, but in the field of pharmaceutics and biochemistry. I only took the basic course in materials. It was a quite interesting course since we got to test tensile strenght and hardness and looked at crystalline structures on metal objects that we heated and cooled in different ways. We also investigated ways to analyze and test polymer materials (plastics). It was great to have a course with some "real" stuff going on.
What are you interested in. Metal alloys, polymers, nanomaterials?. Are you considering chemichal engineering yourself?

**Nikitn** · January 18, 2012, 08:45 AM

Thank you. But what roles do chemical engineers have in, say, developing new polymers or analysing stuff? They work in teams with chemists, other engineers etc. right? So what is their job assignments, typically?

and logios, yeah I do. I am thinking about the petroleum industry, but I don't know what chemical engineers do there. Otherwise nanotechnology sounds really sweet, I always liked understanding reactions at the smallest level ie physical chemistry.

**Adar** · January 18, 2012, 10:55 AM

Originally Posted by Nikitn

Thank you. But what roles do chemical engineers have in, say, developing new polymers or analysing stuff? They work in teams with chemists, other engineers etc. right? So what is their job assignments, typically?

That depends very much on what job you get. But based on what my friends do and my experience from working in the industry on summer holidays I can say that people I know spend their days in the following ways (on a normal day):

Ionized vapor deposition: Someone figured out that this is a great method in the lab. His job is essentially to make it work in industrial production (the plasma enters a chamber much larger than in the lab and this causes some huge issues). Essentially he (alone) run the experiment, record the result and physical parameter, then do the same thing again. After a serie of tests he tries to mathematically explain how the plasma moves in the chamber and what causes the deposition rate to vary. Then he got team meetings with other people doing almost the same thing and working in the same room (shared coffee breaks etc).

Pyrolysis of car tires: Essentially he plans how to build the reactor and estimate if it is going to be worth the money. A quite large team and many temporary collaborators. A lot of calculations, trips to see similar equipment etc.

Analytical chemistry: Most often you do the same thing every day and prove that nothing has changed (polymer length the same, no contamination etc). Advantage is that you can focus on your hobbies and some companies try to make sure that you split your time between routine and doing new stuff.

I don't know anyone making new substances (outside of pharmaceutical industry) so I cannot answer that.

**Logios** · January 18, 2012, 05:28 PM

Originally Posted by Nikitn

Thank you. But what roles do chemical engineers have in, say, developing new polymers or analysing stuff? They work in teams with chemists, other engineers etc. right? So what is their job assignments, typically?

and logios, yeah I do. I am thinking about the petroleum industry, but I don't know what chemical engineers do there. Otherwise nanotechnology sounds really sweet, I always liked understanding reactions at the smallest level ie physical chemistry.

I really want to give you a good answer @Nikitn, but I know mostly what I work with myself, and that might not be typical engineering tasks.
I do some work in a research department of a pharmaceutical company for the moment which actually involves that I do the laboratory work with biochemical methods myself. In most other kinds of engineering positions there are technitians performing the actual lab work, and the engineer has more of a desk job.
In my experience from the pharma industry academics are uniformly referred to as "chemists" no matter if they are chemists, engineers, pharmacists, vets, biologists or other. The assignments given can also overlap tremendously with little or no regard to the specific academic background.
In the petroleum industry I can imagine that daily tasks of monitoring and analyzing trends on various outputs (temperatures and pressures on different parts of destillation coloumns ect.) can be interrupted by trouble-shooting tasks where decisions on how to fix problems right now are made by engineers. Longer running projects to optimize processes are mostly done when time is found for them, but some companies use doing projects on external locations to avoid daily disturbances to the project team. If your university does not provide an internship for you in a relevant company, I suggest you try and find one on your own at some point after the first couple of years.
Nanotech is very multi-disciplinary and great if you want to work together with people with many various backgrounds. Physical chemistry and thermodynamics courses should start you up on this, but I am sure that is a given when you start up. I had two courses in the use of nanotech in delivery of drugs to specific tissues using nanoparticles and miniaturizing research methods to increase research output and performance, but it has so many other appliances.
Mathematical modelling, say of process control algoritms is unavoidable for any type of engineers even if many (like me) will probably never use it. There is a thread where it is touched upon here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=490560
I hope this was a bit of inspiration for you.
An entrepreneur you say @Adar, do you own your own business or plan to do so? Maybe you can elaborate a bit on this since starting a research-based company one day is a bit of a wild dream for me.

**Adar** · January 19, 2012, 06:12 AM

Originally Posted by Logios

An entrepreneur you say @Adar, do you own your own business or plan to do so? Maybe you can elaborate a bit on this since starting a research-based company one day is a bit of a wild dream for me.

I am a board member of one company and I am currently starting up my own company together with an experienced professor. I cannot say too much right now but I'll try to remember sending you our new webpage as soon as patent/legal work is finished.

It should be noted that in Sweden we have "lärarundantaget" which means that a university researcher owns the IP rights of his discoveries and not the university. So the infrastructure when commercializing is different.

**Timefool** · January 17, 2012, 07:42 PM

My friend is one. He is contracted with the military and they give him something (but don't tell him what it is or its purpose, its classified or something like that

) and then ask him to find out the properties of it. He says some people that he knows do the opposite and create polymers that fit their clients physical descriptions. From what I can tell, the job he chose was the easier of the two.

**Adar** · January 18, 2012, 07:30 AM

I know some people working with chemical engineering.

One of them works with ionized vapor deposition.

One works with commercializing a technique for pyrolisis of car tires (reduce them to carbon powder, oil and metal).

And I also know some people who work as analytical chemists at a nuclear power plant (identifying alternatives to hydrazine to prevent corrosion) and similar industries.

All of them work in small teams collaborating to achieve the targets set up and it seems like a quite nice jobs.

**cenkiss** · January 18, 2012, 08:55 AM

I am going to be a chemical engineer,too.

**Nikitn** · January 21, 2012, 05:15 AM

Allright, thank you guys. I think I am sure that I'll study chemical engineering, with physical chemistry as my specialization

**Adar** · January 21, 2012, 07:12 AM

Originally Posted by Nikitn

Allright, thank you guys. I think I am sure that I'll study chemical engineering, with physical chemistry as my specialization

Welcome to the crowd.

Is the CBRN-conscript service out of question nowadays?

**Mr. Crow** · January 23, 2012, 02:49 AM

Most of the chemical engineers i know work as middle management in chemical plants; some others do research for universities and private companies. i am a consultant in designing of chemical processes, reactors, and other equipment.