Question

what is the difference between chemistry and chemical engineering ??
is it both are same ??
howmuch syllabus is same as for both ??
what exactly chemist do and what exactly chemical engineer do ??

Answer 1

Fundamentally, the chemists and chemical engineers perform the same chemical reactions. The aspects that differentiate them is the “scale” they work on.

Before, going for the “scale”, let’s compare a microbiologist and a doctor (say, a physician). A microbiology students knows that which antibiotics can be used against the specific pathogenic bacteria; he/she can prove it by performing various laboratory test. However, she/she can’t write a prescription (if allowed to, hypothetically) for the treatment of a pathogen- infected patient. Because simply killing the bacteria is not the goal! The overall goal of the treatment is the killing pathogens, restoring health simultaneously with minimal harm to the patient. A physician can do it better than a microbiologist because she/he can write prescription, how long to continue medications, correlate the biochemical parameters with patient’s health and chose the most effective treatment regime, etc.

Similarly, a chemist can perform all the reactions at laboratory scale that a chemical engineer conducts at industrial scale. Say, however besides that, a chemical engineer can analyze a lot of other information like cost of conduction a chemical reaction, rate of cooling/heating, efficiency of the process, types and size of reaction vessels, rate of feeding reactants and extracting products, purification of product to industrial scale, etc. These information are treated as the backbone for industrial scale production of a molecule by carrying the same chemical reaction that a chemist does in lab at small scale ignoring many of these factor. Therefore, besides chemistry, a chemical engineering may also be expert in fields like mathematics, physics, material science, etc.

Similarity of syllabus: Since both the fields have “chemistry” at their base, the chemical engineering syllabus must contain almost all the syllabus of a chemistry course. However, chemical engineering syllabus additionally may include mathematics, physics, material science, reactor/ fermenter design and maintenance , large scale extraction/ purification of various molecules, flow rate analysis, cost analysis, etc. The syllabus may depend on universities and specialization.

Chemical engineers apply the knowledge of chemistry and allied sciences for the production of molecules at industrial scale. For example, almost all chemistry students know about “saponification” and many of them might have performed it in lab. But most of the time, chemists do not bother about relative cost and benefit, flowrate of reactants and extraction of products for continuous production of soap, etc. How many chemistry produce their own soap or any other product that they can produce in lab ? A chemical engineering analyze all the requirements (see above paragraph) for the production of a molecule (say, for example, soap) at industrial scale using the same basic chemistry in association with mathematics, physics and material sciences, etc.