. "4 Benchmarking Results: Detailed Assessment of U.S. Leadership by Area of Chemical Engineering." International Benchmarking of U.S. Chemical Engineering Research Competitiveness. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2007.
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International Benchmarking of U.S. Chemical Engineering Research Competitiveness
The leadership determinants (ability to attract talented students, educational and research programs, technological infrastructure, cooperation among government, industry, and academia, and funding) and their (projection) are analyzed in Chapter 5.
4.1 AREA-1: ENGINEERING SCIENCE OF PHYSICAL PROCESSES
This area encompasses research in the science and engineering of processes, which are characterized, primarily, by physical phenomena. It has been divided into the following five subareas:
transport processes
thermodynamics
rheology
separations
solid particle processes
4.1.a Transport Processes
The role of transport processes in chemical engineering has evolved from fundamental understanding and cutting edge/frontier research in the 1960s into two parallel fronts: one deepening fundamentals, the other evolving towards applications. It has also taken a role as a platform technology, with a presence in nearly all areas of chemical engineering, spanning from traditional processing (e.g., reactors, separation systems) to biological applications and materials. Transport phenomena, with or without chemical reaction, are at the heart of all processing systems at any scale (macro, micro, nano) and as such are at the very core of chemical engineering; indeed, in what may be a commonly held belief, they define chemical engineering.
In defining the scope of this subarea we have considered traditional aspects of fluid mechanics, such as low Reynolds number flows and turbulent flows including multiphase flows; fluid-particle systems; all types of mass and heat transport, including chemically assisted mass transport; flows of complex fluids (connecting smoothly with rheology); flows induced by electric or magnetic fields (bridging with colloidal science); and transport at interfaces. Other aspects include a blend of research and practical considerations, such as numerical simulation for analysis and design as well as prediction of and correlations for transport properties. Topics of current importance have evolved towards fluid mechanics and mass transport at interfaces and small scales, as in microfluidics, nanoscale devices, molecular-level modeling of tribology, and biological molecules and living cells. Particulate and multiphase flows, interfacial flows, non-Newtonian fluid
