Welcome to general chemistry for engineers! Over the years that I have taught chemistry to engineering undergraduate students, the question that I most often hear is, “why do engineers have to take chemistry?”, followed closely by, “chemistry has nothing to do with what I want to do with my life.” My aim in writing this book is for you to see that nothing can be further from the truth. Chemistry is a foundation for all fields of engineering. It is much more than beakers and test tubes—it’s solar cells, batteries, combustion engines, and more!
Rather than present chemistry for the sake of chemistry and then add in some engineering applications as an afterthought, here, the engineering applications are the focus. The text is separated into engineering application “modules,” where the real-world application is presented first. In each module, it will quickly become apparent that in order to truly understand what is going on in the real-world application, some core chemistry knowledge is required. After you work through the necessary core chemistry topics (organized as “chapters”), you will return to the engineering application module to apply the new knowledge that you have acquired, and to deepen your understanding of the application. Organizing the text in this way ensures that you always stay grounded in the “why should I care” realm, and don’t get bogged down with “useless chemistry” (as my students would say).
If you think about it, this is exactly what engineers do in real life. Engineers do not regurgitate facts that they have learned in a classroom from a traditional discipline like chemistry. Rather, engineers acquire a broad knowledge base about the world around them and then take that knowledge and apply it to some new problem. After working your way through this text, it is my hope that you are equipped with the general chemical knowledge that you will need to apply to new problems in the future, and that you will never shy away from learning new chemistry as needed in your specific discipline.
Dr. Elizabeth C. Griffith teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where her research focused on origin of life chemistry and physics at the water surface. She teaches various undergraduate courses, including general chemistry lecture courses and labs.