The development of chemical production can be traced from antiquity to our time. In the course of this development, the knowledge about the nature of raw materials and products grew, as did the knowledge about methods and processes for their preparation, transformation, and production. The beginnings of chemical engineering science can be found as commodity science and instructional descriptions of substances, recipes, and operations. The repeated verification of findings led to their securing or improvement. From the generalization of experiences from chemical production and the results of targeted experiments to uncover the effective laws and their internal and external connections, the tasks of chemical engineering science emerged. Collecting, describing, and systematizing experiences from chemical production and the experiment, - Analyzing and generalizing the empirical facts and information with the help of the basic sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry), Formulating the specific and objective laws of chemical production or the materials economy, - Applying the laws to the design and operation of chemical plants. It should be understandable that without knowledge of the laws acting in the production process and the manifold relationships, an optimal development, realization, and control of material transformation processes is practically impossible. The previous statements correspond with the definition: "Chemical Engineering is the simultaneous application of the principles of physics, economics, and social sciences to those branches of knowledge that deal directly with the process and the apparatus in which the material is treated in order to effect a change in state, energy content, or composition." In education, chemical engineering science is divided into the specialist disciplines of Chemical Technology, Process Engineering, and Apparatus and Plant Technology, whose common subject is the chemical production process. A chemical process is a technological chain of process units through which the material passes in order to emerge from it chemically transformed at the end. In this sense, the term process unit is understood as the human-intended or controlled interaction between the means of work in the form of an apparatus, a machine, or another device and the material as the object of work with the aim of material change for the purpose of increasing its utility value.
The material change can consist of both a material transformation through chemical reaction and a change in the state of the material as a result of physical processes. In recent literature, a distinction is made between processes and process lines. In accordance with the above definition, a process is therefore the coupling of process units with each other and with the environment to carry out a characteristic material transformation within the framework of a process line. The coupling of such processes into a complex material transformation system, which is operated to satisfy a social need, represents a process line. It becomes clear that the term chemical industry used so far is to be understood very broadly and is more appropriately replaced by the term materials economy. After all, the material-transforming industry includes besides the chemistry of coal, petroleum, and natural gas products, organic and inorganic basic chemicals, plastics, synthetic fibers, pharmaceutical and other chemical specialty products also industrial sectors such as metallurgy, building materials and construction materials, pulp and paper, food and luxury items, as well as the protection of the environment. In the sense of the established tripartite division of chemical engineering science into chemical technology, process engineering, and apparatus and plant technology, the following assignment is made: Chemical technology is regarded as the theory of the entirety of process lines. Its object of work is the investigation and determination of the technological path from raw material to product on the basis of the known chemistry of the intended material transformation, including all auxiliary processes and auxiliary systems (energy and information or automation systems). The work result represents the technological circuit of the process or process line in the form of flow diagrams or models, whereby the process structure is given. Special chemical technology examines concrete processes and process lines related directly to the material. General chemical technology, on the other hand, researches the system behavior of technological circuits independently of specific material bonds using methods of cybernetics, systems engineering, and information theory. Process engineering deals with the general theory of material transformation processes and the equipment for carrying them out. It examines the interactions between the material and the equipment in the form of the
On the basis of the phenomenological and mathematical-physical penetration of these processes, and according to the current state of knowledge, the following are carried out:
to name only the most important process engineering tasks that correspond to the scope and possibilities of this text. Their solution becomes all the more complicated the more one turns from the individual apparatus or its model toward combinations of apparatus or complete plants. After all, a chemical plant represents a complex cybernetic system with various subsystems (material, process, apparatus, energy, measurement, control, and regulation systems), whose mathematical modeling is a prerequisite for operating the plant optimally, e.g., with the help of process computers. Contributions of this kind exceed the scope of this website. The field of apparatus and plant technology ranges from the dimensioning and construction of equipment for chemical production to the preparation of project documentation ready for execution, the assembly and commissioning of plants, as well as questions of safety technology.
The reproduction process in the development and operation of process lines is far more diverse and complicated than presented here. In its various phases (research, design, engineering, construction, manufacturing, building and assembly, commissioning, operation, as well as shutdown and dismantling), engineering disciplines (chemical technology, process engineering, apparatus and plant technology, manufacturing technology, information technology) and market-economy aspects interact in diverse ways. In this regard, reference can only be made to further literature.
© 2001 - 2026 www.chemical-engineer.de All rights reserved.