Electrical Engineering Essay

                                              

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.