1. Computer Science in
Chemical Engineering
➢Basic programming skills help build analytical thinking
and logical reasoning; a good enough reason for any one
to learn how to program.
➢Being familiar with loops, subroutines, variable
assignments etc can turn out to be extremely useful while
working on modeling or advanced data processing.
➢Role of simulation and optimization in the field is
increasing day by day so it will be helpful when you work
on some decent project. Learn some basic simulation
techniques on ASPEN. Solve differential equations on
MATLAB, it can prove to be helpful.
2. It's fun, and it helps in
other ways too you know!
Programming more than anything is fun. It is worth giving a shot
for sure, and you might just find that it is meant for you.
Finally, In India- the job market for chemical engineers is not great- and the
IT industry is dominant. A significant fraction of non-CS engineers do end
up working in the IT industry. At the very worst case, your coding
skills will ensure that you'll never be without a job because of
the massive demand for programmers in India.
It is also a highly transferable skill which will help you in a bunch of
professions- analytics, finance etc. Not only that- autodidactism or self-
learning, is probably the most important skill you can have throughout your
career- applied to everything, not just CS.
3. Direct application in ChE
fields
1) Computational Fluid Dynamics:
This field, as the name suggest, relies heavily on programming as it needs heavy
computing power. For complex research projects in this field, even softwares like
MATLAB aren't very useful because the compiler isn't fast enough. This is where
languages like C++, C, Python and FORTRAN come in. They have insanely fast
compilers, even then the compilation time may be in the order of weeks!!!
2) Control Engineering:
MATLAB is like the essential software for this field. It contains a lot of pre-
programmed toolboxes, which help you simulate stuff before actual implementation.
Developed a new controller? Came up with a better model for the plant? Wanna try
building a model? It all requires simulations before actual implementation and a
certain amount if coding is necessary for this.
