Page 21 - The engineering of chemical reactions

What Do We Need to Know? 5

in the Omnibook and the Minibook, the most-used chemical reaction engineering texts in
the 1980s were those written by Hill and then Fogler, who modified the initial book of
Levenspiel, while keeping most of its material and notation.
The major petroleum and chemical companies have been changing rapidly in the
1980s and 1990s to meet the demands of international competition and changing feedstock
supplies and prices. These changes have drastically altered the demand for chemical
engineers and the skills required of them. Large chemical companies are now looking
for people with greater entrepreneurial skills, and the best job opportunities probably lie
in smaller, nontraditional companies in which versatility is essential for evaluating and
comparing existing processes and designing new processes. The existing and proposed
new chemical processes are too complex to be described by existing chemical reaction
engineering texts.
The first intent of this text is to update the fundamental principles of the operation of
chemical reactors in a brief and logical way. We also intend to keep the text short and cover
the fundamentals of reaction engineering as briefly as possible.
Second, we will attempt to describe the chemical reactors and processes in the
chemical industry, not by simply adding homework problems with industrially relevant
molecules, but by discussing a number of important industrial reaction processes and the
reactors being used to carry them out.
Third, we will add brief historical perspectives to the subject so that students can see
the context from which ideas arose in the development of modern technology. Further, since
the job markets in chemical engineering are changing rapidly, the student may perhaps also
be able to see from its history where chemical reaction engineering might be heading and
the causes and steps by which it has evolved and will continue to evolve.
Every student who has just read that this course will involve descriptions of industrial
process and the history of the chemical process industry is probably already worried about
what will be on the tests. Students usually think that problems with numerical answers
(5.2 liters and 95% conversion) are somehow easier than anything where memorization
is involved. We assure you that most problems will be of the numerical answer type.
However, by the time students become seniors, they usually start to worry (properly) that
their jobs will not just involve simple, well-posed problems but rather examination of messy
situations where the boss does not know the answer (and sometimes doesn’t understand the
problem). You are employed to think about the big picture, and numerical calculations are
only occasionally the best way to find solutions. Our major intent in discussing descriptions
of processes and history is to help you see the contexts in which we need to consider chemical
reactors. Your instructor may ask you to memorize some facts or use facts discussed here to
synthesize a process similar to those here. However, even if your instructor is a total wimp,
we hope that reading about what makes the world of chemical reaction engineering operate
will be both instructive and interesting.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?

There are several aspects of chemical reaction engineering that are encountered by the
chemical engineer that in our opinion are not considered adequately in current texts, and
we will emphasize these aspects here.