Ahmed M. Alhammadi
H00158686
CEL
Hedley Butterfield
English Communications IV
Electrical
Engineering Essay
Important Changes/ Developments in Electrical and Chemical Engineering
over the last 5 years
Many changes or developments have been
happening in these two fields in the last 5 years. It is quite notable how
electrical engineering has helped in shaping many other disciplines through the
innovations and developments that have been taking place in the field. From a
general view electrical engineering is a field in the wide engineering
profession that is concerned with the study and application of electronics,
electricity and electromagnetism. Electrical engineering is a very broad field involving
a multiple number of disciplines, which include power engineering, control
engineering, electronic engineering, and microelectronics, signal processing, telecommunication
engineering, instrumentation engineering and computer engineering (Smit, Morshuis and Gulski, p. 93). In the past,
there had been broad differences between electrical engineering and electronic
engineering, but they have now come to be taken as a single profession.
The last five years has seen many
changes and developments in the wide and diverse area of electrical
engineering. This includes the inventions that have been invented in the disciplines
that make up the wider field. One of the major changes that have happened in
the field in the recent past is the blurring of the distinction between electrical
and electronic engineering (Sevgı, p.94).
This is due to the fact that initially these two were being taken as two distinct
professions, but currently this distinction has been coming into scrutiny and
inventions have helped narrow up this distinction. The discovery and the growth
of power electronics has helped in doing this and done away with the notion
that electrical engineering is mainly concerned with power transmission and
motor control where electronic engineering is concerned with the building up of
small-scale electronic systems such as computers and integrated systems.
The development of fast-speed
integrated circuits and computer chips is a major development that has happened
in the field of electrical engineering. The development of the 64-bit processors
has helped revolutionize the computing discipline and affected many other
disciplines that have been using computer technology in their operations. As
for today, computers are used in almost every sector of the economy bringing
together the much needed speed and accuracy that comes about with their
application in the operations. Electrical
engineering has also played a significant role in the development of signal
processing technologies. These include EDGE, GPRS, GSM and GPS that have been
widely used in mobile technology. These technologies have enhanced communication
through enhancing signal processing and both video and audio filtering making communication
much more efficient.
Chemical engineering is a discipline
in the wider engineering profession that is mainly concerned with physical and
life sciences (Ogawa, p.128). It aims at
coming out with processes that convert raw material or chemicals into more
useful or valuable forms. Chemical engineering can be divided into two parts; chemical
process engineering which is the design, manufacture and operation of chemical
plants and machinery in industrial processes and chemical product engineering
which is the development of new substances such as drugs, foods, beverages, or pharmaceutical
products. Chemical engineering is a very diverse engineering field and covers
the areas of biotechnology, nanotechnology and mineral processing.
Chemical engineers are usually
tasked with the development of economic ways of using materials and energy. The
majority of chemical plants have been automated and chemical and process
engineers are tasked with controlling and directing the processes from computer
systems which has made the whole process a success and simpler to undertake.
Chemical engineering as a discipline has seen lots of developments in
the last five years. Much of the developments and changes that have been
witnessed arise from the development of computing technology and computers. Using
the modern computing technologies, the industrial processes that the chemical
engineers are involved in have made it much easier to undertake by being automated.
By automation, the process and chemical engineers have done lots since the
processes that they control are able to be controlled using diverse and complicated
computer programs.
Chemical engineering has been known
to be very much connected to genetic engineering. This connection has seen the
development of one of the most significant projects in both fields, the Human
Genome Project. Chemical engineering principles have been used widely in the production
of DNA sequences in large quantities which have been widely used to study the
genetics of the human body. The Human Genome Project (HGP) is a scientific
research project that combined principles of genetic and chemical engineering to
determine the sequence of the chemical base pairs which make up DNA (McElheny, p.78). On top of determining the
sequence of the chemical base of the DNA, the project was also aimed at identifying
and mapping genes of the human genome from both physical and functional perspectives.
With this development both chemical and genetic engineers are able analyze the human
genetic system for more understanding and future studies and developments (Lone, p.53).
References
Lone Dog L.
"Whose genes are they? The Human Genome Diversity Project." J Health Soc Policy 10. 4 (1999): 51–66.
McElheny, Victor K. Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project.
New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Ogawa, Kōhei. Chemical
engineering: a new perspective . Netherlands: Elsevier, 2007.
Sevgı, Levent. "From Engineering
Electromagnetics Towards Electromagnetic Engineering: Issues, Chalanges, and
Applications." Turkish Journal of
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences 16 . 1 (2008): 94.
Smit, Johan, Peter Morshuis and Edward Gulski.
"Readjusting the current trend in Electrical Power Engineering." Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering
& Computer Sciences 14 . 1 (2006): 91-97.
