About the significance of chemical engineering, it has much more positive impact than people expected. In the past several decades, our chemical engineers actually are constantly enhance the life of people.
Energy, everything are rely on it. Without energy, the modern society built by us will become nothing. In the last contrary, the main source of energy is depend on the burning of wood and coal. One weakness is that burning coal and wood has a really low efficiency. A lot of energy which is heat will distribute into atmosphere rather than use in where it should be. Second is it will create air pollution. The coal people burned usually are not pure carbon coal. It also has sulfur which will create another bad effect--acid rain.
So, right now, our chemical engineers not only revise the burning way but also invent a lot of other way to supply energy. For burning way, before burn the coal, we will "clean" it by chemical reaction. Also, we will put some basic solution in the chimney to neutralize the acid gas such as SO2. For other ways, we have primary cell and electrolytic cell to produce and store electricity; we have nuclear energy by react radioactive element; also we invent various device to transfer renewable energy such as wind and solar energy to energy people want. I can say chemical engineers contribute a lot for broaden our energy source options.
There are a lot of other achievements done by chemical engineers, please check out this website: http://www.che.ncsu.edu/information/documents/ten_achievements.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment