Process Engineering Renewal 1

Background and Training

Éric Schaer, Jean-Claude André

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786305534
• eBook ISBN: 9781119721529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Chemical & Biochemical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Process engineering emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century and has become an essential scientific discipline for the matter and energy processing industries. Its success is incontrovertible, with the exponential increase in techniques and innovations. Rapid advances in new technologies such as artificial intelligence, as well as current societal needs – sustainable development, climate change, renewable energy, the environment – are developments that must be taken into account in industrial renewal. Process Engineering Renewal 1 – the first volume of three – focuses on training, demonstrating the need for innovation in order for the field to have a framework that is sustainable, in a highly changeable world.

1
Historical Approach to Chemical or Process Engineering

Today we live in a world of what Georges Friedmann calls Sunday drivers – people who have never opened the bonnets of their cars, people for whom functioning is not merely the function of things but also their mysery. (Baudrillard 2005)

Thus, in France, the development of chemical engineering education owes nothing to industrialists. (Grossetti 2004)

The industrialist utopia promised us that the development of the forces of production and the expansion of the economic sphere would liberate humanity from scarcity, injustice and misery […]. It means we must find a new utopia, for as long as we are the prisoners of the utopia collapsing around us, we will remain incapable of perceiving the potential for liberation offered by the changes happening now, or of turning them to our advantage by giving meaning to them. (Gorz 2011)

After Chapelier’s Law, the 19th Century engineer set the manufacturing process in motion. It eradicates artisanal practice and the knowledge system that accompanies it. For the skills of companions, transmitted from master to disciple, teaching with intuition and sensitivity, it substitutes the rationalist approach of applied science. (Gaudin, quoted in André 2019, p. 65)

The scientification of processes comes from this desire for efficiency and the awareness of the implications of science integrated into the company’s know-how. (Hers 1998)

Old technology imposes on new technology its own standards of economic valuation, developed by reference to its natural qualities, thereby introducing a kind of bias in the exercise of economic calculation. (Foray 1992)

The principle of reduction ignores that the whole has qualities, which are not found in the parts. (Wolf 2009)

Science is what the father teaches his son. Technology is what a son teaches his father. (Serres 2017)

It is science whose human ends are affirmed and systematically sought. The technician, the engineer in his current practice, does not use any truth that does not come from a particular science, but it is up to him to make an original synthesis of it. There is technique only where there is purpose. (Berger 1962)

What a technique lacks is not the ability to discover the solution to its problems, but the ability to generalize its solutions. (Canguilhem, quoted in André 2019, p. 93)

According to Isabelle Stengers (1989), chemists, throughout their history, have questioned their identity and their specificities with regard to physics… (Vinck 1999)

The more a commercial company gets media coverage, the more it must devote a significant part of its activity to the production of demand, by investing ever greater resources in attention-grabbing devices. (Citton 2014)

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products. On no other matter, religious, political or moral, is he so elaborately and skillfully and expensively instructured. (Galbraith 1967)

Modeling is constructed as a point of view on the real. (Le Moigne 2013)

[In 1870] spiritually chemistry was a complicated physics with surprises. (Malisoff 1941)

1.1. Introduction

The first is the invention of the distinction between the basic and applied sciences, a distinction that engineering sciences undoubtedly made the mistake of endorsing in the 19th Century, at a time of their extraordinary growth: they condemned themselves to being nothing more than ancillary sciences, humble servants in charge of applying knowledge developed elsewhere and by others: how could they participate in this formidable undertaking of invention rather than discovery, of construction rather than identification, of conception rather than analysis, which characterizes any scientific activity of elaboration of critical and prospective knowledge. (Le Moigne 1993)

Industrial chemistry, which was current at the beginning of the 19th Century, is a body of knowledge that corresponds to the control of the ways of obtaining a marketable product, raw materials and their supply methods, as well as the by-products, and even the economic and environmental performances that allow for profitable manufacturing. According to Bousquet, industrial chemistry is essentially descriptive in nature:

Industrial chemistry is therefore a body of knowledge enabling the chemical engineer and/or researcher concerned in various capacities by the process industries to know which are:

• – the obtaining routes (which are most often unitary process or operation sequences);
• – the obtaining routes (which are most often sequences of raw materials;
• – the production routes (which are most often by-product chains and the economic and environmental performance that allow the production of chemical industry products. (Bousquet 2008)

This new chemical industry was extremely profitable, but difficult to “drive”, as it was then called, and extremely polluting… But with the rise of modern chemistry, chemical manufacturers felt the need to protect their industry, which they said was a victim of obscurantism and prejudice when it was in their eyes the jewel of the French economy and, of course, harmless. It was under their pressure that the decree of 1810 on insalubrious establishments was adopted, the purpose of which was not [...] to protect public health, but to protect industry or, more precisely, to define precisely its rights and those of its neighbours. (Massard-Guilbaud 2004)

For Fressoz (2012), chemical manufacturers were well aware of the risks they posed to their workers and the environment as a whole. But they had chosen to consciously ignor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Historical Approach to Chemical or Process Engineering
• 2 Training in Process Engineering
• Appendix 1: ENSIC – Training
• Appendix 2: ITEACH – Training
• Index
• End User License Agreement