Chemical engineering gained its academic foundations with the development of the chemical industry beginning in the late 19th century, and today it is an important discipline that plays a key role in a wide range of industries.

What is chemical engineering?

Chemical engineering is the study of designing optimal production processes and advancing the technology to manipulate and control them in order to make factories more organized. Chemical engineering focuses not just on understanding chemical reactions, but on developing technical systems that can implement these reactions on a large scale. This enables us to produce chemicals efficiently and economically in large-scale production facilities.

The origins and development of chemical engineering

The term chemical engineering was first introduced by James F. Donnelly in 1839. Later on, George Edward Davis established the basic concepts of chemical engineering. It was during World War I (1914-1918) that the discipline really took off. The development of the internal combustion engine in the industrialized countries of the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, led to a surge in the demand for refined petroleum products and organic chemicals, which led to the establishment of chemical engineering as a discipline. The importance of chemical engineering in the manufacture of military supplies, which needed to be produced on a large scale during the war, led to its further systematic development.
World War II sparked the beginning of the petrochemical industry. It was necessary to organize optimal chemical processes through physical unit operations and reaction manipulations, and reaction engineering, which plays a central role in modern chemical engineering, was born. Later, in the 1960s, kinetic phenomenology and molecular engineering, which dealt with granular materials, emerged to provide a common interpretation of unit operations. In the 1970s, process systems engineering, including process control systems and process design, emerged to efficiently control the process, and the foundation of chemical engineering, which comprehensively studies the entire chemical process, was established.

Academic Independence of Chemical Engineering

It has only been a century since chemical engineering became an independent field of engineering worldwide. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intense competition in the chemical industry between Britain, the United States, and Germany favored the study of chemical engineering. The first chemical engineering lecture is believed to have been given in Manchester, England, in 1887, when a chemical engineer named George E. Davis gave 12 lectures on the processes of the chemical plants in England at the time. The following year, in 1888, the chemistry department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States also offered chemical engineering lectures. A few years later, thanks to the significant contributions of Arthur A. Noyes and William H. Walker, chemical engineering became an independent university course. The development of chemical engineering was largely due to the organization of chemical engineering education.

Early textbooks and the establishment of chemical engineering societies

Meanwhile, Davis of England, who gave the first chemical engineering lectures, published a book on the subject in 1901, which included a chapter on unit operations, which was later established as an important aspect of chemical engineering. For these contributions, Davis is historically credited with calling chemical engineering a new, independent engineering discipline. In the early days of chemical engineering’s recognition as a separate discipline, it was still covered under chemistry within the American Chemical Society. However, there was a debate about the separation of chemistry and chemical engineering, with Milton C. Whitaker, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, arguing that chemists lacked an engineering education and therefore could not apply the ideas they developed. Eventually, on June 22, 1908, about 40 people met at the Engineers Club of Philadelphia to form the first American Society of Chemical Engineers. In the early days, the society discussed how chemical engineering should be taught in universities, and today it plays a central role in chemical engineering.

Introduction and development of chemical engineering in Korea

Chemical engineering first officially began in Korea in October 1946, when the Department of Chemical Engineering was established at the Seoul National University College of Engineering. Although chemical engineering (then called applied chemistry) was being taught in small increments under Japanese colonial rule, the history of chemical engineering can be considered to be from the liberation period. Chemical engineering in Korea began with the establishment of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Seoul National University College of Engineering during the liberation period. At that time, it is estimated that there were about 50 Korean chemists from universities in Korea and abroad, mostly teaching in Korea and Japan. Kim Dong-il, the first dean of the College of Engineering, Na Ik-young, Ma Hyung-ok, and others formed the initial faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering. They laid the foundation for chemical engineering education in Korea over a four-year period from 1946 to 1949.
Meanwhile, chemical engineering and applied chemistry students were initially active in the Korean Chemical Society. This is similar to the way chemical engineering was organized within chemistry at the beginning in the United States. However, with the completion of Korea’s first chemical plant, the Chungju Fertilizer Plant, in 1959, and the completion and operation of several large-scale chemical plants in the 1960s, chemical engineering students became more united. After preparations and an initiation contest, on December 8, 1962, about 20 chemical engineering students from all over the country gathered in a lecture hall at Seoul National University Medical School and held the founding general meeting of the Korean Society of Chemical Engineering, officially launching the society.

The present and future of chemical engineering

Today, chemical engineering has become one of the major majors in the engineering colleges of major universities in Korea and abroad, and as it has become firmly established as a distinct academic field, it has expanded to include not only the traditional areas of chemical engineering, but also areas such as biological engineering and biomedicine. This expansion means that chemical engineering has evolved beyond the convergence of chemistry and engineering to explore new possibilities through the convergence of various sciences and technologies. Today, chemical engineering is one of the most promising fields, with research into technologies such as nanotechnology and fuel cells.
In addition, with the growing focus on sustainability, chemical engineering is playing an important role in the development of environmentally friendly and energy-efficient processes. For example, carbon capture technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or the production of green energy from biomass. These technologies are expected to be key to solving future energy challenges.
In conclusion, chemical engineering is now a discipline that encompasses a wide range of applications beyond simple manufacturing technology, and it will play an important role across industries in the future. The advancement of chemical engineering will make an important contribution to solving various problems in our society, and we look forward to its continued development and innovation.