Latin Americans Push Ch.E. Education Schools modernize curricula and facilities, shy away from training specialists

one there, together with Peerless Chemical (New York), but decided against it because the market which they expected never materialized. Wyandotte also claims that existing capacity in Venezuela was a factor.

Now, Ponce Chemicals will build a 20 ton-per-day plant, due on stream b y mid-1962. Ponce will be owned 75% by West India Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Morton, and 25% by Ponce Salt, a Puerto Rican solar salt producer. The plant will be lo­cated near Ponce.

The plant will use De Nora cells to make its product, will get raw ma­terial from Morton's operation on Inagua, an island in the Bahamas. Besides making caustic and chlorine, Ponce will upgrade chlorine to hypo-chlorides, other chlorides, and chlo­rates and make hydrochloric acid.

Puerto Rico has two other plants which could supply raw materials to other chemical companies. One is Caribe Nitrogen, 49% owned by W. R. Grace. (The rest is owned largely by local interests.) Its plant at Guanica makes anhydrous ammonia (125 tons daily), sulfuric acid (350 tons), and ammonium sulfate (400 tons).

Another is Caribbean Refining near San Juan, the island's capital. Carib­bean has only 18,000 barrels per day of capacity but is expanding to 30,000 barrels per day. Still too small to support a petrochemical industry, it nevertheless has such ambitions.

These are the plants upon which Puerto Rico hopes to build an inte­grated chemical industry. Meanwhile, other mainland companies are setting up shop on the island.

Paint. Reichhold Chemicals del Caribe, a joint venture of Reichhold and Superior Paints (Puerto Rico), is breaking ground near San Juan for a plant to produce alkyd resins, poly­vinyl acetate emulsions, and acrylics. W. P. Fuller will open a paint plant at Bayomon, and Sherwin-Williams, Glidden, and Dutch Master (Brook­lyn) have also filed applications for tax exemptions on paint operations.

Lestoil Products has already re­ceived its tax exemption for a plant to make liquid detergents and dry bleach. And Du Pont, whose engi­neers have been scouring the island for plant sites, confirms that it is con­sidering a plant to make bromine from sea water. However, the company hasn't settled on Puerto Rico or, for that matter, on such a project itself.

Chemical engineering colleges in Latin America face some big hurdles before they can help to promote the indus­trialization of their countries. This was the consensus among chemical en­gineering educators airing problems at the First Inter-American Congress of Chemical Engineering at San Juan, Puerto Rico (see page 101).

Like Latin American chemical engi­neers, who have no standardized nomenclature, the chemical engineer­ing schools have no common stand­ards. The idea of who is and who is not a chemical engineer varies from country to country in Latin America. In some of the smaller, less industrialized countries, chemical en­gineering teaching is still affected by the old concept of the industrial chem­ist—a man who can run a chemical plant, handling everything from me­chanical problems to running analytical tests. He may be the only technical man in the plant, with no adequate technicians to help. Sometimes a good chemical engineer from the U.S. may not be able to handle such a job, because he hasn't had enough analyti­cal chemistry.

But in other countries chemical en­gineering education may follow similar lines to those in the U.S. "Nearly all of our text books are American—

although we do use one German one," says Dr. W. Dreifuss of the University of Conception, Conception, Chile. Of the four chemical engineering schools in Chile, three have curricula similar to those in the U.S. The other fol­lows the German system of separating chemists and "process engineers."

Reading English is not much of a problem for Chilean university stu­dents. In the secondary schools Chilean students must study two foreign languages. French is com­pulsory, and the second is usually English, although it may be German or Italian.

But languages can be a problem in Latin America. One professor from a small Central American country com­plained that it is almost impossible to attract U.S. chemical engineering teachers who can speak Spanish.

Because studies in the humanities have received a great deal of emphasis in the secondary schools, little work in these subjects is included in the uni­versity curriculum in Chile. Dr. Drei­fuss believes that education on a uni­versity level in these subjects should be on an extracurricular basis. In Chile, the educational system re­sembles that in France to some extent. It is a six-six system—six years in a sec­ondary school and six years in the

NEW FACILITIES. New building houses part of the expanding Technological Insti­tute of the University of Concepcion at Concepcion, Chile

NOV. 6f 1961 P A R T 1 C & E N 23

UNIT OPERATIONS. Chemical engineering students at the University of Concep­cion, Concepcion, Chile, get training in a modern unit operations laboratory. The curriculum is similar to those in the U.S. But the approach to chemical engineering education varies a great deal from one Latin American country to another, and sometimes from one institution to another within the same country

university for a bachelor's degree. A chemical engineering graduate coming to the U.S. can usually get a master's degree in one year.

Countries Differ. Requirements for chemical engineers are different in dif­ferent countries. In Argentina, for example, when the faculty of chemical engineering of Universidad Nacional del Litoral at Santa Fe was set up in 1919, Argentina was an almost com­pletely agricultural country and un­derdeveloped industrially. But big economic, social, and political changes have taken place in Argentina since then. These led to a complete over­hauling of the system of chemical en­gineering education in 1957, according to UNL's Dr. Nemesio César de la Puente.

Courses are more rigidly defined than they had been, and a system of

prerequisites has been set up so that students may take courses in logical order. This is a big help to the high proportion of students who must work part time to support themselves; now they can arrange their courses to fit in with their outside work. One of the big changes in the new system is that large lecture classes are replaced by small classes in which the students take an active part. A big emphasis is placed on backing up theoretical work with practical work—under the same professor.

Normal time for the curriculum is five years for a full-time student. The academic year begins in March rather than September, since seasons are re­versed in the southern hemisphere, and is divided into two semesters.

Dr. de la Puente doesn't claim the new system is original or that it is per­

fectly organized. But he believes it is the best system that could be put into operation in a short time and fit in with the particular conditions that exist in Argentina.

At the Universidad de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay, at Montevideo, Uruguay, the practical portion of chemical engineering education has been held up by a lack of funds for building unit operations laboratories and other large-scale facilities needed in modern engineering education. However, in recent years, UNESCO has helped with funds so that the chemical engineering laboratories could be modernized with new equip­ment and a new professor (from Ger­many) could be employed. Students pay no tuition there. The course is a five-year one.

The University of Puerto Rico at­tracts a number of Latin American chemical engineering students. A U.S. land grant institution, the university has a five-year chemical engineering course. The first three years are the same for all engineers. This year there are 15 chemical engineering stu­dents in the fifth year and 40 in the fourth year.

No Specialists. One thing most Latin American chemical engineering educators seem to agree upon is that they can't afford to turn out specialists. 'One year one of our graduates may be running a synthetic ammonia plant. The next he may be working in a wood processing plant," says one South American. It is harder and harder to put everything into the curriculum, to train general chemical engineers, be­cause technology is advancing so rapidly. But the chemical industries in Latin America are not yet big enough to support many specialists.

At the University of Concepcion in Chile there is a slight specialization during the last year. The student takes an elective in the general field of his thesis or engineering project-biochemical engineering, for example.

As the beginning of an attempt toward establishing professional standards recognized all over Latin America, Dr. Cesar Fighetti of the University of Concepcion in Chile has proposed the establishment of a Latin American Association of Faculties and Schools of Chemical Engineering. This organization would establish minimum requirements for chemical engineering education and help to ad­vance chemical engineering teaching generally.

24 C & E N NOV. 6, 1961 P A R T 1