Understand what chemical engineers do is not an easy task before entering the job market. Publicity tends to romance the chemical process engineer roles and tasks and it does not help students and fresh engineers to get what is the real-life of a chemical engineer.
My name is Jeferson Costa and I have been working with plant design since 2007 as a chemical process engineer in all phases of industrial project, i. e., conceptual design, basic engineering, detailed engineering, erection and commissioning, start-up, plant troubleshooting etc for oil and gas, petrochemical and chemical industry. Although I did not have any mentor to help me, I am here to mentor you.
I can tell you that before putting new medicines, new kinds of energy sources, a better environment and so on to work, there is a lot of hard work to be done. And most often, you will not learn this from theorical teachers at College or Universities. Following my content you can fill this lack of info.
SITE SURVEY
For the chemical process engineer and plant design, in small words, site survey means going to the field to verify the information you need to develop your plant design.
In a greenfield project, that one where there is no industrial plant in operation or built yet, you will rely on contract info and discussion with the customer. For brownfield projects, I mean, that one where there is an existing plant and you need to debottleneck, revamp or interface it with a new unit, beside the documents and discussion with the customer, it is very important that a multidisciplinary team go to the field to verify locally if the documentation in fact represents current plant installation.
Each discipline (mechanical, electrical, civil etc) will focus on your scope of service. The chemical process engineer will check the P&ID (See “What is P&ID: PIPING and Instrumentation Diagram or PROCESS and Instrumentation Diagram?” for more details) available against current instalattion. It is not uncommon during the cycle of life of a plant, operation do some changes in order to improve plant performance. In a Company without a design culture documents will not be updated. However for a bigger project, third party companies will need to work with documents. Working with documents out of date is very dangerous will increase project budge and may lead to unsafe contiditions. Site survey is done to prevent that.
Return to chemical process engineer, some key tasks in site survey are the verification or performance of P&ID As Built, gather field info related to plant operation, and talk to Operation Team about specific operation issues. All of this must be done without losing safety concerns.
CHEMICAL ENGINEER DAY IN THE LIFE
To help people at my Mentoring Channel in Telegram INProcess understand this subject, I did a video series where I went to a industrial plant to do a site survey. You can find at INProcess all videos without cut or edition.
In this video series I shared the main tasks and consideration about safety, meeting with operation, marked up P&ID and a complete walkthrough at a process system.
Access the playlist below to have a complete overview of my site survey in an industrial plant. It is not a Hollywood production, in fact it is a home-based (amateur) production, but I am pretty sure that you will start understanding what is waiting for you in a day in the life of a chemical process engineer working with plant design.
