Chemical engineers play an important role in today's world. They are responsible for a broad range of activities that have direct impact on the daily operation of industries, and the overall design of processes, equipment and plants. Chemical engineers are dedicated to process engineering and product engineering. They operate and optimize the processes in all the manufacturing industries, and they also conceive and design new products that meet the high standards for sustainable and green solutions.
Although existing pharmaceutical, cements, steels, paper, food and beverage industries have high demand of chemical engineers, most of these industries recruit them from the foreign markets. Further, the country is currently running big and small industries and many mechanical, civil and electrical engineers are involved in such diverse fields. Until now, no single academic institute in Nepal has chemical engineering curriculum.
To uplift the economy and production capacity of Nepal, the government of Nepal is positively seeking to increase the number of industrial regions throughout the country. With such policies reinforcing the scope of production, Nepal will soon move towards more effective and intensive industrialization, and foremost, this requires the highly skilled chemical engineers. Hence, the proposed chemical engineering program is the first of its kind in Nepal and it aims to produce highly skilled graduates to fulfill the country's demand.
With the advent of industrial revolution, new challenges emerged that were related to scaling up of the chemical and physical processes, separation processes, reactive processes, sustainable process design and growth of the manufacturing plants. Thus the new profession was born and it was coined as "Chemical Engineering" to reflect its origin in the production of chemicals. The emerging field of chemical engineering was consolidated by the unique concepts of unit operations and chemical reaction engineering, which were again based on engineering principles such as thermodynamics, mass, momentum and energy transfer, and chemical kinetics.
Today, chemical engineering has directly or indirectly affected nearly all major entities in our lives. So, chemical engineers are sometimes even referred to as "Universal Engineers" to allude to their broad scope of applications in science and engineering. The chemical engineers are well-equipped to solve diverse kinds of problems with strong emphasis on inherent safety, economics, and sustainability of the solutions. They are equally adept at solving technical problems as well as handling the managerial challenges in the complex organizational systems.
The broad scope of chemical engineering entails greater responsibilities on the shoulders of the chemical engineers. They are trained to conceptualize, design, construct, control, and optimize all kinds of processes and operations at industrial scale with utmost focus on quality, efficiency, economics, safety, system integration and sustainability. They are also responsible for controlling the pollution arising from the physical and chemical processes, and providing remediation measures for environmental problems. Hence, the country beckons the chemical engineers to provide sustainable solutions to the needs of the present and future generations.
Career Opportunities
- Chemical Process Industries related to all the manufactured products
- Design and construction of plants and equipments
- Energy
- Environment
- Food and drinks
- Oil and gas
- Petroleum
- Agro-products and agro-chemicals
- Biotechnology
- Electronics and materials
- Computers
- Aerospace
- Automobile
- Medical technology
- Pharmaceuticals
- Health-care
- Government
- Companies and Management Education