Chemical Engineering (with placement year)

Chemical Engineering is a highly adaptable and versatile area of engineering. It applies the principles of chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, and economics to transform energy and materials into useful and affordable products. It covers the research, design and operation of new and existing processes to minimise environmental impacts, ensure compliance with legal and ethical standards and maximise profits and benefits to society.

Research suggests an expected shortfall in skilled chemical engineers to support the UK’s green recovery and net-zero target. This means chemical engineers will be highly sought after for the specialist work required.

Chemical engineers take leading roles in many different sectors. These range from energy and water, food, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, consumer products, and even finance. They use their technical know-how and ingenuity to develop solutions to many of the world’s most pressing challenges. For example, climate change and the large-scale production of new vaccines.

We conduct world-leading research to drive the sustainable revolution in areas such as low-carbon technologies, next-generation healthcare and advanced manufacturing. Our new National Centre for the Circular Chemical Economy seeks to transform the UK chemical sector to eliminate waste and reliance on fossil technologies. Our research directly informs our teaching and project work, ensuring our students are fully equipped to meet 21st-century challenges.

Our Chemical Engineering degrees will teach you how to apply scientific and engineering principles to the design and analysis of chemical process equipment and flow sheets. Our bench and pilot-scale laboratories, VR simulation, computer classes and project work will help you to understand and apply taught principles to engineering problems, whilst also developing your key laboratory, teamwork and IT skills.

We offer a number of options for this degree. These include language options in years one and two (at different levels) in either French, German, Spanish or Mandarin, as an alternative to Materials Processing and Food Engineering. You can then choose up to three optional modules in their final year including management, environmental, IT, bioprocessing and healthcare topics. During the final design project, you will work both in teams and individually to conceptualise and design an industrial plant to address a specified design challenge. This challenge is usually aligned with your module choices and the research strengths of the department. The project brings together all aspects of the degree. This includes initial technology selection and flowsheet development, detailed design of individual unit operation, process optimisation, safety and operability analysis and finally full economic and environmental evaluation.

During the MEng degree, you will also complete a Professional Development Project (PDP). This is where you can join a research group at Loughborough, in industry or abroad, to develop new knowledge in science or engineering. The PDP is an excellent opportunity to gain first-hand insight into our ground-breaking research. You will also acquire key transferable skills, such as project planning, reporting and data analysis. Recent projects have ranged from electrochemical harvesting of CO2 for renewable chemical production to the development of microfluidic manufacturing devices and the application of artificial neural networks to predict material behaviour.

For a full list of areas studied, see the 'What You'll Study' section of the course page on our website.

Our course offers good balance between knowledge and application-based assessments.

Overall, around 50% of assessments are exam-based, but the proportion reduces slightly from the first to final year. The other half of our assessments are in the form of coursework, both individually and in groups, such as reports, oral presentations, posters or software files. These are excellent opportunities to develop essential communication and teamwork skills and receive detailed verbal or written feedback.

Professionally accredited courses provide industry-wide recognition of the quality of your qualification.

• Chemical Engineers, Institution of