《化学工程与工艺专业英语》课文翻译Unit 10 What Is Chemical Engineering(2)

1881 年英国曾经准备把化学工业的一个新的协会命名为 “化学工程师协会” ， 这个建议遭到了拒绝。另一方面，由于受到来自工业界日益加重的压力，大学的课程开始体 现出除了培养分析工作者还要培养化学工程师的要求。 现在仅仅对现有工业过程进行描述已 经不够了，需要对各种特殊工业进行工艺属性的分析。这就为引入热力学及动力学、溶液和 相等物理化学新思想提供了空间。 A key figure in this transformation was the chemical consultant, George Davis (1850-1907), the first secretary of the Society of Chemical Industry. In 1887 Davis, then a lecture at the Manchester Technical School, gave a series of lectures on chemical engineering, which he defined as the study of “the application of machinery and plant to the utilization of chemical action on the large scale”. The course, which revolved around the type of plant involved in large-scale industrial operations such as drying, crashing, distillation, fermentation, evaporation and crystallization, slowly became recognized as a model for courses elsewhere, not only in Britain, but overseas. The first fully fledged course in chemical engineering in Britain was not introduced until 1909;though in America, Lewis Norton (1855-1893) of MIT pioneered a Davis-type course as early as 1888. 在这个转变期，一位关键的人物是化学顾问 George Davis，化学工业协会的首任秘书。

1887 年 Davis 那时是 Manchester 专科学校的一名讲师，做了一系列有关化学工程学的讲座。 他把化学工程学定义为对“大规模化学生产中所应用的机器和工厂”的研究。这们课程包括 了大规模工业化操作的工厂的各种类型，如干燥、破碎、蒸馏、发酵、蒸发和结晶。后来逐 渐在别的地方而不仅仅在英国，而是国外，成为许多课程的雏形。英国直到 1909 年化学工 程学才成为一门较为完善的课程，而在美国，MIT 的 Lewis Norton 早在 1888 年就已率先开 出了 Davis 型课程。 In 1915, Arthur D. Little, in a report on MIT’s programme, referred to it as the study of “unit operations” and this neatly encapsulated the distinctive feature of chemical engineering in the twentieth century. The reasons for the success of the Davis movement are clear: it avoided revealing the secrets of specific chemical processes protected by patents or by an owner’s reticence—factors that had always seriously inhibited manufacturers from supporting academic programmes of training in the past. Davis overcame this difficulty by converting chemical industries “into separate phenomena which could be studied independently” and, indeed, experimented with in pilot plants within a university or technical college workshop. 1915 年，Arthur D. little 在一份 MIT 的计划书中，提出了“单元操作”这个概念化学工程与工艺英语翻译，这几 乎为二十世纪化学工程学的突出特点做了定性。

Davis 这一倡议的成功原因是很明显的：它 避免了泄露特殊化学过程中受专利权或某个拥有者的保留权所保护的秘密。 过去这种泄露已 经严重限制了制造者对学院研究机构训练计划的支持。Davis 把化学工业分解为“能独立进 行研究的单个的工序” 从而克服了这个困难。 并且在大学或专科学校的工厂里用中试车间进行了试验。 In effect he applied the ethics of industrial consultancy by which experience was transmitted “from plant to plant and from process to process in such a way which did not compromise the private or specific knowledge which contributed to a given plant’s profitability”. The concept of unit operations held that any chemical manufacturing process could be resolved into a coordinated series of operations such as pulverizing, drying, roasting, electrolyzing, and so on. Thus, for example, the academic study of the specific aspects of turpentine manufacture could be replaced by the generic study of distillation, a process common to many other industries. A quantitative form of the unit operations concept emerged around 1920s, just in time for the nation’s first gasoline crisis. The ability of chemical engineers to quantitatively characterize unit operations such as distillation allowed for the rational design of the first modern oil refineries. The first boom of employment of chemical engineers in the oil industry was on. 他采用了工业顾问公司的理念，经验传递从一个车间到另一个车间，从一个过程到另一 个过程。

这种方式不包含限于某个给定工厂的利润的私人的或特殊的知识。 单元操作的概念 使每一个化学制造过程都能分解为一系列的操作步骤，如研末、干燥、烤干、电解等等。例 如， 学校对松节油制造的特殊性质的研究可以用蒸馏属性研究来代替。 这是一个对许多其它 工业制造也很普通的工艺过程。单元操作概念的定量形式大概出现在 1920 年，刚好是在第 一次全球石油危机出现的时候。 化学工程师能赋予单元操作定量特性的能力使得他们合理地 设计了第一座现代炼油厂。石油工业第一次大量聘请化学工程师的繁荣时代开始了。 During this period of intensive development of unit operations, other classical tools of chemical engineering analysis were introduced or were extensively developed. These included studies of the material and energy balance of processes and fundamental thermodynamic studies of multicomponent systems. 在单元操作密集繁殖的时代，化学工程学另一些经典的分析手段也开始被引入或广泛发 展。

这包括过程中材料和能量平衡的研究以及多组分体系中基础热力学的研究。 Chemical engineers played a key role in helping the United States and its allies win World War Ⅱ. They developed routes to synthetic rubber to replace the sources of natural rubber that were lost to the Japanese early in the war. They provided the uranium-235 needed to build the atomic bomb, scaling up the manufacturing process in one step from the laboratory to the largest industrial plant that had ever been built. And they were instrumental in perfecting the manufacture of penicillin, which saved the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers. 化学工程师在帮助美国及其盟国赢得第二次世界大战的胜利中起了关键的作用。

他们发 展了合成橡胶的方法以代替在战争初期因日本的封锁而失去来源的天然橡胶。 他们提供了制 造原子弹所需要的铀-235，把制造过程从实验室研究一步放大到当时最大规模的工业化工 厂，而他们在完善 penicillin 的生产工艺中也是功不可没，它挽救了几十万受伤士兵的生命。 The Engineering Science Movement. Dissatisfied with empirical descriptions of process equipment performance, chemical engineers began to reexamine unit operations from a more fundamental point of view. The phenomena that take place in unit operations were resolved into sets of molecular events. Quantitative mechanistic models for these events were developed and used to analyze existing equipment. Mathematical models of processes and reactors weredeveloped and applied to capital-intensive U.S. industries such as commodity petrochemicals. 工程学运动。