Process Engineering - History

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:

    In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
    Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)

    What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)