The role of chemical engineering in biotechnology

Depending on which definition is chosen, biotechnology can be considered to be one of the oldest industrial technologies or one of the newest. For the chemical engineer, however, the major distinction is in terms of the scale of operation. The majority of products of the new biotechnology are extremely high value, low volume biochemicals. Thus recovery (separation) processes for such products may be relatively costly and energy intensive, because of the small quantities involved, but at the same time must be highly efficient in order to minimize loss of valuable product. This contrasts with the more traditional biotechnological processes of the food and beverage industries, antibiotic and medium value pharmaceuticals production, and wastewater treatment. Here, the problems for the chemical engineer are more like those in the chemical or process industries.

In this paper a typical biological process is compared with its counterpart chemical process and the role of the chemical engineer in designing and developing such a process is examined through a series of examples. Just as the chemical industry for decades was dominated by the chemist, so the bioprocess industry is still dominated by the industrial microbiologist. There are consequently many areas in which improvements can be made to established industrial biological processes by the application of simple engineering concepts.