Machine Learning Applications in Chemical Engineering

Chemical engineering is not often a field associated with artificial intelligence or machine learning, but there is a great deal of untapped potential ready to be harnessed. A chemical engineer is someone who can utilise chemistry and the underlying laws of engineering to design, control, and operate a process to produce something at scale; this ‘something’ could be anything from shampoo to hydrogen. A process plant will always be modelled before construction, it will have a control programme written for it, and when it operates several parameters will be measured to assess its performance; artificial intelligence can have an impact in all of these areas. In this chapter, we explore how the world of artificial intelligence is gradually being incorporated into chemical engineering and the potential benefits (and risks) that this brings with it.