Program – Chemical

Chemical engineering involves very little chemistry. This is only one of the many incongruities one will find at university. Chemical engineering involves mass and energy balances, unit operations, thermodynamics, and process control to name a few. Only a small portion of a chemical plant will consist of the reaction vessel. The rest will consist of separation systems. A chemical reaction will always produce undesired products mixed in with the desired products.
A large part of chemical engineering is designing systems to separate the desired products from the waste components. Of course there are a myriad of other topics in chemical engineering such as bioprocess engineering.
Chemical engineers scale up the chemical and physical processes discovered and studied by chemists. No chemist is interested in the amount of heat released during an exothermic reaction; or the amount of work required for the stir plate to keep solution homogeneous. When the system is much larger, heat exchangers with proper coolant flow rates are required to keep the reaction vessel at optimal conditions.
First year of chemical engineering is, for the most part, the same as every other engineering program here at Waterloo. Calculus (MATH115), physics (PHYS115), chemistry (CHE102), and linear algebra (MATH116) are the core first year engineering course and will be mainly a review of high school. The chemical engineering concepts course (CHE100) will be the one course that differentiates chemical engineering from the rest of engineering. This course will consist of both a lecture and lab component. This course will introduce you to mass balances, unit conversions, process, and process variable. These basic concepts will be the building blocks of chemical engineering, and will be studied in more depth in future courses. The lab component is essentially a MS Excel course. This will be useful for practically every other course in the chemical engineering degree.