What exactly does a Chemical Engineer do?

Chemical engineers can fill a vast number of roles in a vast number of fields. "Traditional" chemical engineers design, implement, modify, and maintain the hardware systems necessary to carry out a specific chemical reaction at maximum efficiency. Basically the chemists figure out how to make something chemically. It's then the chemical engineer's job to scale that up and make bulk production possible and affordable. I myself am a research chemical engineer. My job entails designing and testing micro chemical and thermal systems for the DOE. Currently I am working on a project where I take a fuel such as propane and react it catalytically to produce hydrogen and single carbon products. We then separate out the hydrogen and send it to a fuel cell, which produces electricity. My graduate work was using magnetic resonace microscopy (like an MRI) to do material science studies of fuel cell materials. I did an internship at a company making solar energy cells, where I standardized an acid ...  more