Industries employing chemical engineers

It is sincerely hoped that the information presented in this document will lead to an even more impressive record for the entire industry however, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, its consultants, CCPS Subcommittee members, their employers, their employers officers and directors, and Arthur D. Little, Inc., disclaim making or giving any warranties or representations, express or implied, including with respect to fitness, intended purpose, use or merchantability and/or correctness or accuracy of the content of the information presented in this document. As between (1) American Institute of Chemical Engineers, its consultants, CCPS Subcommittee members, their employers, their employers officers and directors, and Arthur D. Little, Inc., and (2) the user of this document, the user accepts any legal liability or responsibility whatsoever for the consequence of its use or misuse. 

TABLE 4.4 Employment of Chemical Engineers in the Eleetronies Industry, 1977-1986a... 

When one takes the cost of industrial compliance with RCRA to handle currently generated wastes and adds the cost of Superfund to clean up the wastes of the past, it becomes obvious that there are strong incentives for technology development in the area of waste minimization and treatment, and many opportunities for research and employment for chemical engineers. 

Chemical engineering undergraduate eurricula have traditionally been designed to train students for employment in the conventional chemical processing industries. The eurrent core emrieulum is remarkably successful in this effort. Chemical engineers will continue to play a major role in the ehemical and petroleum industries, but new areas of application as well as new emphases on environmental protection process safety and advanced computation, design, and proeess control will require some modifications of the curriculiun. 

The Bureau of Mines, within the Department of the Interior, funds a substantial amount of chemical engineering research in its in-house laboratories, particularly in the area of hydrometallrugical separation processes. The U.S. minerals industry is currently in a depressed state typified by diminished research efforts within industrial laboratories and, in some cases, wholesale termination of research operations. As a result, new researchers have bleak prospects for industrial employment. At the same time, the United States cannot afford to lose a professional generation of research persormel in an area that would be of critical importance if foreign supplies of certain metals were interrupted. 

Resident Time Distribution (RTD) is widely employed in the chemical engineering industry, as an analytical tool for characterizing flow dynamics within reactor vessels. RTD provides a quantitative measure of the back-mixing with in a reactor system [2]. However the cost and time involved in building and operating a pilot- or full scale reactor for RTD analysis can be economically prohibitive. As such we have implemented a numerical RTD technique through the FLUENT (ver. 6.1) commercial CFD package. 

In the design of an industrial scale reactor for a new process, or an old one that employs a new catalyst, it is common practice to carry out both bench and pilot plant studies before finalizing the design of the commercial scale reactor. The bench scale studies yield the best information about the intrinsic chemical kinetics and the associated rate expression. However, when taken alone, they force the chemical engineer to rely on standard empirical correlations and prediction methods in order to determine the possible influence of heat and mass transfer processes on the rates that will be observed in industrial scale equipment. The pilot scale studies can provide a test of the applicability of the correlations and an indication of potential limitations that physical processes may place on conversion rates. These pilot plant studies can provide extremely useful information on the temperature distribution in the reactor and on contacting patterns when... 

There is no detailed documentation of the number of chemists and chemical engineers employed in the nuclear power industry. Within AECL there are 300 in a total staff of 6000 (5%). Within Ontario Hydro (26) there are approximately 145 in a total staff of 3300 associated with nuclear power generation (4.4%). The Canadian Nuclear Association (CNA) estimates that in 1976 there were about 18,400 people employed in the Canadian nuclear industry, excluding the uranium industry (27) If about 4% of these were chemists or chemical engineers, one can estimate that a total of about 700 were employed in the industry at that time. There is likely to be considerable expansion of the industry by 1985, particularly in the utilities such as Ontario Hydro, Hydro Quebec, and New Brunswick Power which already have additional nuclear capacity under construction. The expansion will in turn provide new opportunities for members of this profession. 

Table 1.7 shows the total employment of all workers, technical and nontechnical, by the chemical industry as well as by all manufacturing. Note that about 18.4 million workers are in all manufacturing, about 1.0 million in Chemicals and Allied Products. Employment in the chemical industry is relatively constant. This is to be contrasted to other major industries— construction and automobiles, for example— where employment can be down during a recession. Overall the chemical industry is in good shape. It is believed that about 160,000 chemists and 120,000 chemical engineers are employed in the U.S. The American Chemical Society alone has over 160,000 members currently. Unemployment of chemists is low, and in March 2001 it was 1.5%. It is always much lower than the nationwide unemployment. 

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