History
Process systems engineering (PSE) is a relatively young area in chemical engineering. The first time that this term was used was in a Special Volume of the AIChE Symposium Series in 1961. However, it was not until 1982 when the first international symposium on this topic took place in Kyoto, Japan, that the term PSE started to become widely accepted.
The first textbook in the area was “Strategy of Process Engineering” by Dale F. Rudd and Charles C. Watson, Wiley, 1968. The Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division, Area 10 of AIChE, was founded in 1977 and currently has about 1200 members. CAST has four sections: Process Design, Process Control, Process Operations, and Applied Mathematics.
The first journal devoted to PSE was "Computers and Chemical Engineering," which appeared in 1977. The Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference in 1980 in Henniker was one of the first meetings in a series on that topic in the PSE area. It is now accompanied by the successful series on Control (CPC), Operations (FOCAPO), and the world-wide series entitled Process Systems Engineering. The CACHE Corporation (Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering), which organizes these conferences, was initially launched by academics in 1970, motivated by the introduction of process simulation in the chemical engineering curriculum.
There are currently about 80 academics in the PSE area in the US, and a listing of these faculty can be found in http://cepac.cheme.cmu.edu/pse1.html. A very large fraction of the faculty in the PSE area can be traced back to Professor Roger W.H. Sargent from Imperial College, one of the pioneers in the area. PSE is an active area of research in many other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, several other European countries, Japan, Korea, and China.
Since 1992 Europe hosts the annual ESCAPE meeting (European Symposium of Computer Aided Process Engineering). Each produces proceedings—e.g., see Comput. Chem. Engng., Vol. 21 Supplement (1997) for the Proceedings of the joint PSE ‘97/ESCAPE 7 meeting held in 1997.
Read more about this topic: Process Engineering
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends portraits hang and look thereon;
Irelands history in their lineaments trace;
Think where mans glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)