ABSTRACT
Chemical Engineering* has gone through a number of phases of evolution since its intuitive application more than 3000 years ago and its formal introduction in 1888 (Darton et al., 2003; Kim, 2002; Peppas, 1989). Evolution and revolution are the core features of growth of knowledge in general. Engineering is said to be ‘the conscious application of science to the problems of economic production’. In its journey towards the present level of maturity, chemical engineering has replenished its foundation by inputs from the advances in chemical, physical, biological, mathematical and computational sciences and has passionately embraced the profession’s breadth.† The approach, strategy and goal have always been to have a fundamental understanding of the physico-chemical and biological processes and to apply this knowledge in designing, constructing and operating a broad spectrum of chemical and biochemical process plants and, more recently, even in understanding the disease processes, drug administration in human systems, electronic material processing, technology of nanomaterials and many others. Such understanding always helps in achieving improved outcome of a process. In many situations, an understanding of the relevant scientific principles becomes possible, perhaps easier, only through the language of mathematics. The basic objective of this book is to understand the physical world of engineering relevant to chemical and biological processes, to describe and translate it into the language of mathematics with insight and pragmatic imagination and, finally, to investigate its consequence by means of analytical methods and techniques (Figure 1.1) for improved performance of engineering systems directly or indirectly, now or in future.
