Republic of the Philippines

DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

PHILIPPINE SCIENCE HIGH SCHOOL SYSTEM

Subject Code ENGINEERING Selected Topics in Engineering

Module Code 1.0 Branches and Fields of Engineering

Lesson Code 1.4 Four Main Branches of Engineering – Electrical and Chemical

Time Limit 30 minutes

TARGET (Time allocation: 1 minute) Actual time allocation: _____ minutes

By the end of this module, the student should be able to:

1. Identify the fields related to electrical and chemical engineering.
2. Discuss the contributions of the different electrical and chemical engineering fields to society.
3. Differentiate the various fields under electrical and chemical engineering.

HOOK (Time allocation: 2 minutes) Actual time allocation: _____ minutes

Electrical engineering is one of the newer branches of engineering when compared to civil and
mechanical engineering. This is because the concept of electricity and the onset of useful devices
didn’t come into fruition before the implementation of Michael Faraday’s Law of Induction.

On the other hand, chemical engineering is one of the broadest branches of engineering among the
four. Oftentimes, chemical engineering is thought of as chemistry applied in engineering, but it is
actually engineering applied towards chemicals. "
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IGNITE (Time allocation: 10 minutes) Actual time allocation: _____ minutes

In the previous lesson, you were introduced to mechanical engineering and its areas of interest. In
today’s discussion, the electrical and chemical engineering will be presented together. These two
branches have the potential to further usher in emerging fields in engineering.

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

The field of electrical engineering can be divided into three basic categories: telecommunication, power
and energy, and computer.

Telecommunication Engineering is the branch responsible for communicating information through

long distance channels. This field emphasizes on the need to encode, compress, and encrypt data
along the digital and wireless networks. Electrical engineers who have specialized in this discipline
has potential professions as Field Test, Network Planning and Service engineers. These are the people
you’ll encounter handling tasks in your internet service providers, radio and television broadcasting
companies, etc.

Power and Energy Engineering is the branch that focuses on the use of electricity as the major
energy resource for being the most flexible and cleanest energy supply options. In order to promote
the electricity grid, several technologies in smart monitoring, communications and control have

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 1 of 9

transformed the way it works. Electrical engineers design, build and develop advanced generators and
power electronics to turn electricity into useful energy services (UNSW, n.d.). Even more specific
careers related to Power and Energy Engineering are the ones involved in the generation of electricity
from water, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and fossil fuel. Recent technologies have turned the
renewable energy sources towards the use of biomass.

Computer Engineering is the branch involving the designing, building, and fixing computers and
their components, along with matching digital devices to their respective software programs. This is
one of the most proliferous branches of electrical engineering as it has been providing great solutions
to various engineering problems through the use of ever-improving devices and technologies. Unlike
the general electrical engineers who are more engaged with electricity and its uses, computer
engineers would be engaged in dealing with minute amounts of voltages and current to create devices
that respond in a programmable way.

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

The field of chemical engineering can be divided into five categories: environmental, materials
science, agricultural, paper, and sustainable design (typesofengineeringdegrees.org).

Environmental Engineering is a sub-branch of civil engineering, but due to the nature of factors
affecting the environment being in the form of chemicals and their production or use, chemical
engineering can be considered as its mother branch as well. One of the environmental impacts of
humans on the planet are in the form of pollution as a result of development and manufacturing
processes. As such, chemical engineers extend efforts to curb their respective areas’ environmental
impacts using engineering practices and innovations.

Materials Science Engineering is the branch that focuses on the study of materials and their behavior
towards other materials and chemicals. Subsets of materials science engineering include plastics,
ceramics and polymers. It is a very practical profession aimed at studying, developing and creating
materials which are stronger, lighter and more environmentally friendly.

Agricultural Engineering is the branch which applies engineering to the agricultural industry by
means of assistance towards farming such as soil conservation and salinity, ground preparation,
irrigation, and machinery design. Alongside their tasks is to develop more effective harvest techniques
through machinery design and production.

Paper Engineering is the branch which uses the concepts of molecular science, wood pulping, and
fluid mechanics to aid in the understanding of the processes involved in paper production.

Sustainable Design Engineering is the branch which takes into account the three factors of
sustainability: environmental impact, social and economic considerations throughout not just the
production of an object, but also including its whole life cycle. Furthermore, they can have post
graduate studies on industrial wastewater management, emission control and hazardous waste
management.

NAVIGATE (Time allocation: 16 minutes) Actual time allocation: _____ minutes

To complete our lesson, watch the following clips below and form a timeline on the milestones to the
history of electrical or chemical engineering. Choose one of the clips to watch and study.

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 2 of 9

The History of Electrical Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nB1Ntku06w

Transcript of Youtube Video subtitles was downloaded using https://savesubs.com/ extract and
download tool.

-Start of Transcript-
“Electricity powers our world. And we harness it through electrical engineering, the field that
focuses on the application of electricity and electromagnetism in our everyday lives.

Just as you have blood pumping through your veins, machines and systems often need
electrical power flowing through their wires to work. It’s the lifeblood of our society. And it’s
hard to imagine society today without three of the main branches of electrical engineering:
telecommunications, power and lighting; and computer engineering. They each came about in
their own way, with their own challenges and victories, their own heroes and sometimes
villains. And you’d be surprised how much death is involved in the history of electrical
engineering. Well, it can be dangerous.

Electrical engineering deals with the properties of electricity and magnetism. So it stands to
reason that the field didn’t really exist until we knew what those things were. No one had a
very good understanding of electromagnetism until English physicist William Gilbert released
his principal work, De Magnete, or “On the Magnet”, back in 1600.

After years of experimentation, he found that the needle of a compass points north south and
dips downwards because the Earth is basically a giant magnet. He was the first to describe the
phenomena we now associate with electrical attraction and magnetic poles, which is why
many view him as the father of electrical studies.

Now, electrical conduction – which is the movement of electrically charged particles through
a transmission medium – wasn’t discovered until around 1729, by a British scientist –
Stephen Gray. He discovered it while doing experiments in which he connected a glass tube
to various objects, like an ivory ball or a piece of cork, by wire or string.

When he rubbed the glass tube, creating friction, he found the object at the other end of the
line would be electrified. With the age of discovery and colonization upon the world, could
Gray’s work be used to produce a faster means of communication?

This brings us to the start of the first field of electrical engineering: telecommunication.
Efforts to communicate over long distances, by things like semaphore, were undertaken as
early as the 1700s. But it wasn’t until 1837 that Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles
Wheatstone patented the first electric telegraph. Their design used five or six magnetic
needles to sway right or left to indicate specific letters. This early model was a little
impractical because of its cost, but the men later patented a new version that only used one
magnetic needle. Their invention was clearly a neat idea.

But it didn’t really take off, until it was used to solve a murder that sounds like it was lifted
from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes novel. On New Year’s Day 1845, a man named John
Tawell gave a woman he was seeing a fatal dose of poison. As the poison set in, she started to
scream, which alerted the neighbors. And Tawell ran off in a panic, thinking he escaped the
law as he boarded a train from Slough to London.

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 3 of 9

But his escape was foiled by technology. His description was sent by telegraph to London,
where Tawell was arrested and later tried and hanged. It’s a rather gruesome way to make an
invention popular, but it spread the story of the electric telegraph nonetheless.

Around the same time as all of this was happening, Samuel Morse was making his own
developments in the United States. He figured out how to use an electromagnet with a pen, so
that when the electromagnet was energized, the pen made a mark on paper. In 1838, he
developed a system of dots and dashes, now known as Morse code, so that messages could be
easily transmitted. By 1844, he had obtained financial support from Congress and built the
first telegraph line in the United States.

It travelled between Baltimore and Washington, and on May 24th, he sent the line’s first
message, “What hath God wrought.”

About 20 years later, in 1866, the British ship Great Eastern succeeded in laying the first
permanent telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean. Before it, large bodies of water were a
big obstacle for means of telecommunication.

After the transatlantic telegraph line, some engineers began to realize that by fluctuating an
electric current, they could induce different sound vibrations. It made them wonder, if they
could manipulate sound vibrations, could they input a sound on one end of a telegraph line
and replicate the same sound on the other end? Could they capture the human voice? By
1876, they did just that, with the invention of the telephone.

A few different minds came up with similar ideas at the same time, but Alexander Graham
Bell was the first to get the patent. He was able to use a fluctuating current to vary the
magnetism in the coil of an electromagnet, which caused a small piece of iron to vibrate on a
diaphragm. This replicated the vibration that had initially sent the fluctuation, which
reproduced the initial sound. Now you could call talk to people who were far away, but you
still needed telephone lines and a phone with a physical connection to them.

But that changed when Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves around 1887. It was
soon realized that these waves could carry a signal by modifying their wavelength, amplitude,
and frequency. This led to the radio, and the never-ending confusion over who gets credit for
inventing it.

Now, after World War I, electrical engineers manipulated these signals and found that along
with the conversion of light to electrical impulses, they could create a visual broadcast:
television. Since then, we’ve taken these signals even further. With the internet and wifi,
we’ve developed nearly instant, wireless communication around the world.

But electrical engineering is far more than telecommunication. We have electrical engineering
to thank for supplying power and light. In 1801, Sir Humphry Davy discovered that he could
produce a brilliant spark, or arc, between two carbon rods in a battery circuit. This is called
arc lighting. Davy’s battery wasn’t powerful enough to produce a stable arc. So arc lighting
wasn’t commercially feasible until the 1870’s, after Belgian-born engineer Zénobe-Théophile
Gramme developed a generator that could support a higher power capacity. It was called the
Gramme dynamo, a continuous-current electrical generator that drove the push for electrical
power.

While arc lighting began showing up on streets around the world, Thomas Edison realized
that arc lighting was too bright to be used in the home. This led to his development of the
incandescent lamp. By capitalizing on the work of many others, his incandescent lighting
systems were soon featured at popular exhibits such as the Paris Lighting Exhibition in 1881
and the Crystal Palace in London.

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 4 of 9

 But Edison quickly gained competition, most notably from George Westinghouse and Nikola
Tesla. This led to what’s now remembered as the War of Currents, with Westinghouse and
Tesla as proponents of an alternating, or AC, current against Edison’s direct, or DC, current.
Edison did his best to discredit AC currents by trying to convince the public they were
dangerous. He had animals electrocuted by AC currents on public display, and even
recommended electrocution as a death-penalty alternative to hanging prisoners. At which he
succeeded. The first person to be executed by electricity was a convicted murderer named
William Kemmler, who was put to death in the electric chair in 1890.

Despite his other efforts, though, Edison failed to discredit the push for AC. Westinghouse
won the contract to supply electricity to the 1893 World’s fair in Chicago, and AC currents
have since become dominant in the electric power industry.

We also have electrical engineering to thank for many of the electronic devices we use every
day. That brings us to the third field of electrical engineering: computers. In their beginning,
before World War II, most computers were part of what was called “radio engineering”.

Most of the computer’s focus was on radar, radio, and early television. Their primary work
was in processing the signals of those devices. Computers only began to gain a broader
audience after the transistor was developed in 1947. The point-contact transistor was a
semiconductor device that could amplify or switch electrical signals. It allowed electrical
engineers to replace vacuum tubes, which were bulky, unstable, and consumed too much
power.

But while the computers could be smaller, they were still pretty large. They also needed a
separate integrated chip for each one of their functions. Then, in 1968, American engineer
Marcian Hoff helped solve these problems.

He conceived of a universal processor that could be used by all computers. His work led to
the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor. Since microprocessors were so
tiny, the computers themselves could be even smaller.

And, that’s how electrical engineers shaped the world we live in today: with
telecommunications, electric power and lighting, and computers.

The fact is, it takes all three of these fields – none of which existed until a couple hundred
years ago – to work together, for you to watch me right now.”

-End of Transcript-

The History of Chemical Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRKyJRAxjpM

Transcript of Youtube Video subtitles was downloaded using https://savesubs.com/ extract and
download tool.

-Start of Transcript-
“Our world is made up of matter. And one way that we study matter is with chemistry. How
we use that knowledge leads us to chemical engineering.

Chemical engineering is one of the broadest of the engineering fields, focused not only on
chemicals which make up everything – but also on developing and designing plants and

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 5 of 9

processes for manufacturing chemicals.

Now, let’s imagine we’ve come up with an amazing new product that we have to create
through a chemical process. It could be some new kind of personal water purifier, or makeup
that lasts as long as you want it to, or a revolutionary clothing material.

Whatever it is, we’re going to have to go through some steps before we all get rich. Once
we’ve designed our product, we’ll need to create a facility where we can make it. And in
order to know how to do that, it would help if you understand a little about the history of
chemical engineering.

To begin, let’s dispel a common assumption: that chemical engineering is simply chemistry
applied to engineering.

Sure, there’s a lot of chemistry involved, but the engineering side has a lot to do with
answering questions, like “What can we do with these chemicals? How can we make them?
Where can we go from here, and What are the possibilities?” Chemical engineering got its
unofficial start back around the time of the American Revolutionary War.

During the war, blockades were put up to stop trade between the American colonies an
Europe. France was especially affected by these blockades, because America is where it got
its supply of sodium carbonate, also known as soda ash.

At the time, soda ash was used for a whole bunch of things, from cooking, to manufacturing
glass and paper, to making soap. Since France couldn’t get sodium carbonate from its normal
trade routes, the French Royal Academy offered up a prize in 1775 to anyone who could
make sodium carbonate from sodium chloride – which we know as common salt.

It took about 15 years, but a French chemist and physician named Nicolas Leblanc finally
figured out how to do it around 1789. His methods, now known as the Leblanc Process, first
heated sodium chloride with sulfuric acid to produce sodium sulfate, which was called the salt
cake. The salt cake was then mixed with crushed limestone and coal, and fired.

This left the combination of sodium carbonate and calcium sulfide, also known as black ash.
The final step separated the sodium carbonate from the black ash by washing it with water,
which was then evaporated. We call this extraction process lixiviation.

Leblanc’s process became the forerunner of modern chemical manufacturing, and paved the
way for future chemical engineers to come. By 1791, he opened up a small factory in Saint
Denis and began large-scale production of soda ash. But his plant was soon taken over by
revolutionaries during the French Revolution, who also released his trade secrets.

While this process was revolutionary in its own right, it was pretty bad for the environment. It
produced a ton of waste that smelled rather putrid. Since chemical processes can often have
nasty byproducts, governments can often pass pollution legislation, especially around big
cities and bodies of water.

But none of this has stopped the chemical industry from growing. In the late 19th century,
British chemist George Davis worked as an inspector for the Alkali Act, which was an early
piece of environmental legislation in response to the Leblanc process. The act required soda
manufacturers to reduce the amount of hydrochloric acid gas that they released into the
atmosphere.

Around 1887, Davis gave a series of lectures at the Manchester School of Technology. His
talks formed the basis for his two-volume Handbook of Chemical Engineering, which was the

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 6 of 9

first of its kind. There were already chemistry books written for specific industries, like acid
production and brewing.

But what made Davis’ work unique was that it organized basic operations that are common to
many industries, like transporting liquids and gases or distillation. In the US, his work helped
stimulate new ways of thinking about chemical processes and sparked the creation of
chemical engineering degrees at universities around the country. Any chemical engineers that
we work with to help develop our product will likely have their education rooted in Davis’
teachings.

Around the turn of the 20th century, cars were starting to become a regular part of modern
life. And soon chemical engineers were playing an important role in their use, by making
gasoline. Drills were already finding crude oil, but that’s not gasoline.

The oil needed to be refined. So we needed refineries, which were basically giant chemical
plants. Chemical engineers improved the process of making gasoline by introducing methods
like cracking, where heavy hydrocarbon molecules are broken down into lighter molecules by
heat and pressure.

They also implemented the process of polymerization, where propylene and butylene are
combined into molecules of two or three times their original molecular weight.

With these improvements, gasoline became more economically viable, which made gas
cheaper and owning a car less expensive. Now, large-scale chemical production like this
requires a lot of planning.

So, as chemical plants develop, a big part of chemical engineering becomes what we’ll call
“Unit Operations”. This was first introduced by the American Arthur D. Little in 1915, and it
breaks down each part of a chemical plant into individual units.

Do you need to get chemicals flowing from one side of the plant to the other? Use pipes.
That’s a unit. And you’ll need pumps to drive the flow. That’s another unit. Need to stimulate
a reaction? Use a reactor. Want to mix those chemicals together? Go for a mixer. Need to
separate them? Try distillation columns or maybe reverse osmosis membranes. All of these
are units, and they highlight the key theories that chemical engineers need to understand to
keep a plant running.

It’s important to think of processes as a whole, but it will be just as important to break down
our chemical plant into unit operations when we get to the manufacturing phase. Once
engineers realized – in part thanks to Little’s work – that all of these unit operations were
founded on basic principles, such as momentum transfer, mass transfer, and thermodynamics,
they could then become more creative in how they manufactured chemicals.

They no longer had to use the same equipment for the same limited purposes. Instead, they
could devise new ways of using their tools and machines. This allowed chemical engineering
to grow into one of the broadest engineering fields.

As recently as the 1970’s, the field was much more narrow than it is now. Back then, around
80% of graduating chemical engineers took jobs in the chemical process industry and
government.

By 2000, that 80% had dropped to about 50%. One of the reasons for this was the emergence
of biotechnology. Heavily focused on research and development, biotechnology engineering
applies technology to biological systems and living organisms.

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 7 of 9

 Once we know how and why biological processes work, we can find ways to change, adapt,
and control them, with the aim of making our lives better. In a similar fashion, pharmaceutical
and healthcare companies also played a big role in expanding what chemical engineers do.

Every day, new drugs and medicines are made and improved upon. Chemical engineers also
work on how best to deliver these drugs into our bodies.

Some might best be injected, like insulin or an epipen, while others work well in a spray
form, like an inhaler.

A lot of chemical engineering goes into many of the foods that we eat as well. We’ve had to
figure out such dark magic as getting corn syrup from corn and making
artificial sweeteners.

We’ve found dairy substitutes and used plants to make vegan and vegetarian meats that taste
like they came from an animal – kind of. This has all done wonders for people with food
allergies and dietary restrictions.

There’s also a growing focus on the environment and sustainable energy within the field of
chemical engineering.

We want to both preserve what we already have and find energy sources that won’t run out of
power. So one source that’s closely related to chemical engineering is biomass: renewable
organic material that comes from plants and animals. This ranges from wood and leftover
crops, to garbage and manure.

As of 2016, biomass fuels provide about 5% of the primary energy used in the United States.
And chemical engineers play a big part in figuring out what can be used as biomass and how
to best break it down to get energy from it.

All of these developments in chemical engineering are what will really give us the knowledge
to make our wonderful new product, whatever it is. We can improve upon what’s already
there, or make something truly revolutionary. When you’re a creator, the possibilities
are endless.”

KNOT (Time allocation: 1 minute) Actual time allocation: _____ minutes

In this lesson, you were presented with three branches of electrical engineering: telecommunications,
power and energy and computer. On the other hand, chemical engineering has five branches:
environmental, materials science, agricultural, paper, and sustainable design.

REFERENCES:

CrashCourse. (2018, June 14). The History of Chemical Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #5 2
[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRKyJRAxjpM

CrashCourse. (2018, June 07). The History of Electric Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #4 2
[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nB1Ntku06w

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 8 of 9

Prepared by: JOHN DEE A. MANGOBA Reviewed by: BOBBY U. ARGOTE II

Position: Special Science Teacher III Position: Special Science Teacher IV

Campus: PSHS-IRC Campus: PSHS-CVC

Selected Topics in Engineering – Grade 11 or 12 – Page 9 of 9