I am a chemist specialized in electrochemistry, and I run an independent publication on materials and energy. In light of the upcoming end of the suspension of Chinese export controls on rare earths in November, I have recorded a 15-minute video on the separation of rare earths.

The overview:

- Almost all lanthanides are found in the 3+ state, so redox methods are ruled out, and separation is based on the small, gradual decrease in ionic radius throughout the series (the lanthanide contraction).

- In solvent extraction, the separation factor between neighboring elements is close to 1, so a single extraction step barely affects purity. Magnetic-grade product requires cascades of countercurrent mixer-decanters, and large plants can have hundreds of stages.

- Waste increases proportionally: in the case of sulfuric acid cracking, figures from the Chinese industry indicate approximately 75 m³ of acidic wastewater and about one metric ton of radioactive waste per metric ton of concentrate.

This chemical process, combined with the offshoring of waste by Western companies, is why China mines about 60% of rare earths but refines approximately 91%.

Here the article with all references with the corresponding video.

A question for anyone who has worked on SX circuits: How much have improvements in the extractant and cascade control actually reduced the number of stages on an industrial scale? The lab literature looks promising, but I’ve found limited evidence from operating plants.

I’m currently taking mass transport and separations, and I’m looking for advice on how to study these subjects effectively, especially from people who initially struggled with transport courses but eventually figured out how to approach them.

For some context, I struggled pretty badly with fluid dynamics last semester and heat transfer the semester before that. Looking back, I think one of my biggest problems is that I can learn equations and follow worked examples, but I don’t always develop enough physical intuition to look at a new problem and understand what is actually happening, what assumptions are reasonable, and how to set the problem up from first principles.

For my current class, our main textbooks are Welty for mass transport and Seader for separations. We also used Cussler as a supplemental text when we covered some of the earlier diffusion material.

I’m unfortunately at the point in the semester where I need to do some damage control. We only have two midterms, each worth 30%, and the final is worth 32%. I’m pretty sure I did terribly on the first midterm, so I need to significantly improve how I’m studying before the second midterm and final.

For people who did well in mass transfer/separations (or eventually got good at transport phenomena):

How did you study differently from courses where memorization or straightforward problem repetition works?

How did you build physical intuition for diffusion, mass transfer coefficients, boundary layers, interphase transport, staged separations, etc.?

When you get a problem you haven’t seen before, what is your thought process for going from the physical situation → assumptions → balances/governing equations → solution?

Did you find it more useful to spend time reading Welty/Seader/Cussler, reviewing lecture notes, re-deriving equations, or mostly grinding problems?

How do you review a problem after solving it so that you actually learn something transferable instead of just learning how to solve that particular problem?

Are there any specific resources, textbooks, YouTube channels, problem sets, or other materials that helped transport/separations finally “click”?

For anyone who also struggled with fluids and heat transfer beforehand, was there something you eventually changed about your approach that made transport courses more manageable?

I’m especially interested in concrete study methods—how you organize practice, how you diagnose what you don’t understand, how you review mistakes, and how you develop the intuition to recognize what approach a problem is asking for.

At this point I know “study more” isn’t really the answer. I need to study better, so I’d appreciate any advice from people who have been in a similar position.

I’m a senior chemical engineering student graduating in Fall 2027. My internship wraps up in the very beginning of December and my classes don’t start until the middle of January. I’m an out of country student and I don’t typically go home for winter breaks, so I have a whole month of December plus 1.5 weeks in January to spare. What are some things I can do to spend this time productively? Projects, certifications, events, etc.

I’m a final-year Chemical Engineering student at an IIT and have an offer from an investment bank paying around ₹1.5 lakh per month.

I’m confused whether to pursue finance or explore core Chemical Engineering opportunities, given that I’ve spent four years studying the subject.

I don’t want to make this decision based solely on the starting salary. I want to understand the long-term career growth, compensation, work-life balance, and job satisfaction in both fields.

I’m gonna have an interview with the hiring manager for an entry level, on site application engineer position at Flowserve after HR screening.
For those who has interviewed with Flowserve, what kind of questions should I expect? Is it mostly behavioral or technical?

Hi Guys/Gals,

Recently, I started writing articles about process engineering. It's a project that originally started as writing a book called 'Experiences of a Process Engineer'. I never fully got to it. But writing shorter articles has been helpful. I am hoping to write the consistently. Here are the first four. Hope you provide some feedback/comments. And hope it is interesting/helpful in some way.

https://sp7254.substack.com/p/the-doc-part-1?r=93fx8t

https://sp7254.substack.com/p/you-cant-always-get-what-you-want-dd8?r=93fx8t

https://sp7254.substack.com/p/the-rapidly-fluctuating-gauge?r=93fx8t

https://sp7254.substack.com/p/the-teasing-tower?r=93fx8t

Do WESPs reduce metals like hexavalent chromium to a less toxic form (Cr3+ or even metal)? I'm coming from a PhD in organic chemistry with extensive inorganic and electrochemical lab skills and this makes sense to me logically, but I'm not sure of the effectiveness on bulk scale.

I graduated with a Chem E degree from a state school with an average GPA and never landed an internship. Since then I’ve been applying to everything I can find, both engineering and technician roles, and mostly getting rejections or silence. I am in the San Francisco bay area.

I’ve interviewed for a lab technician job at a semiconductor services company. If I get an offer, I plan to take it for the income and the experience. It pays okay but not near what I wanted.

Is this a bad role to start in? Would it hurt my chances of becoming an engineer later, or is going from technician to engineer a realistic path? Is there anything I should do while I’m there to improve my odds, or should I keep applying elsewhere the whole time?

I was wondering whether anyone has already made the experience of an exchange semester in China as a Chemical Engineering major coming from Europe or the US. Most of the information I am able to gather from my home university indicates that a high level of Mandarin is almost a requirement for enrollment in most interesting courses, even at a graduate level, as most of the experience reports I have found came from ethnically Chinese students who were already fluent in the language and wanted to experience the different educational styles.

Does anyone have any suggestions on which universities and programs might be suitable for a graduate-level ChemE without requiring a high level of Chinese? The exchange would be almost a year in the future for me, but it would feel like too strong a bet to suppose I would be able to get fluent in Chinese from a bit more than scratch.

Most importantly, I find the information on chemical engineering in China a bit cryptic (also outside unis lol). If anyone has some experience with that, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

Hi everyone,

I'm a recent chemical engineering graduate from Colombia, and I'm interested in pursuing further studies focused on biomass pyrolysis and the potential use of agricultural residues in sustainable farming systems.

I'm particularly interested in how thermochemical conversion processes could help turn agricultural waste into useful resources and how this research could eventually be applied in Colombia.

I'm still exploring the academic path toward this goal, so I'd appreciate hearing from people who work in biomass conversion, pyrolysis, or related research areas.

What skills, research topics, or experimental techniques would you recommend prioritizing for someone hoping to pursue this field at graduate level?

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I want to do my user certification exam on aspen HYSYS. However i'm currently struggling on number 66 or "6666" on the "Questions" file attached on the drive. In my HYSYS file, it require me to input the sizing (Page 2) even though i inputted every information on the question file. You can access my aspen file on the drive link with the file "Aspen Section 2". Here is the Drive files.

Anyone know how to fix this issue? hopefully u could give me ur aspen file so that i could see the correct specification to answer this question.

Also, could anyone verify the answers on the file "Questions" as the highlighter wasn't actually my answer i just got it from the internet.

Hi everyone

To the chemE graduates that don’t work in process engineering. What do you guys do?

Might apply this summer, and i know i personally want to be more in the lab (rly want to go into cosmetics) but i feel like every chem engineer works as a process engineer?🥲

I study at one of the top universities in my country and I'm really really lost.. what should I learn rn ? What skills do I develop and what extracurriculars do I take part in? Seniors said that I need to learn C++. My subjects for sem 1 are:

Mathematics

Physics

Chemistry

Biotechnology

Ethics

Material energy balances.

Material energy balance is just hell and so far I'm kinda hating this degree . What to do ?

Hello everyone,

I am about to graduate with a degree in kinesiology with a biology emphasis but very late in my college career decided I would prefer to have an engineering focus in the medical field rather than be a clinician. With that being said, my goal would be to work in biotech/pharma. As far as I can tell either of these engineering disciplines can achieve that but are there differences/pros and cons to going either direction or is it the same since it’s the same industry? As far as schooling goes as well I can choose between getting a second bachelors, or doing a year of pre reqs and then completing a masters program.

Any and all guidance to help give me any sort of clarity would be so appreciated! Also let me know if I can give any more important details I missed to the situation. Thanks!

Hey everyone - I've posted on this sub over the past several years as I've done a yearly Compensation Report for Chemical Engineers. This sub has been a integral part of that journey and now I want to tell you about a new website/app I just launched, where that report will now live moving forward.

benchcomp.com

What I Did:
I took all of the data from the last report and moved it over to it's new home on BenchComp.com. It remains anonymous as always - and there are several security measures I undertook, which I detail below. This new site allows me to provide more insight and also more specific insight for you, the user. The tab I'm most excited about is the "My Compensation Snapshot". You can get access to this page by submitting your data, but essentially it allows you to create a personalized compensation snapshot for yourself which you can email (as a PDF) to yourself and use however you'd like.

Why I Did It:
There is an extensive "how this works" part of the site, but I had two main reasons I did this:

a) The dataset had become so large in recent years that it was taking me 60+ hours every January to clean the data, organize the data and analyze/report the data. This site makes it so that most of that work is automated. As entries come in, they are held in a pending pool - each datapoint is spot-checked by me and after approval, those datapoints enter the dataset. Old data points leave the dataset after 365-days. This means that the dataset is quite practically, real-time.

b) Over the years, I had gotten a lot of requests from members of other engineering sub-disciplines asking for the same kind of information I was providing to Chemical Engineers. BenchComp allows me to gather, analyze and report data for Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Civil Engineers, Material Science/Engineers, and Industrial/Systems Engineers. If you've benefitted from and/or like what I'm doing, would you tell your friends with other engineering backgrounds to come and support this?

What's New?
In addition to the 'My Compensation Snapshot' page I already mentioned as well as a number of new ways the data can be segmented and broken down, this site also has a lot more industry information. One of the target audiences for this site is younger engineers (and/or students) who are new to the industry. The dataset tended to skew towards this demographic anyway, but I wanted it to be more useful than just compensation data, so we added quite a bit of information about companies, their locations and just general information about their manufacturing operations. More of this will be added in the coming weeks and months.

Data Security:
We took data security very seriously with this project and as always, my commitment to never sell or share data remains. Two of the main security features we added were a) charts and tables only feature calculated numbers. In other words, the dataset lives on a server and all calculations that area performed are performed on the server side - and then the results of those calculations are what ends up being sent to the browser. Single data points cannot be isolated. b) when a series of data limiters would reduce a sample to less than 6, I opted to not show results. This serves a couple of purposes, but mainly, single data points cannot be isolated in this way and also, results which come from sample sizes that are too small are not shown. We also blocked AI training crawlers from the site. LLMs and search engines can still find us, but they can't scrape data. If you want your data deleted, there is a very clear process for that and a link on the bottom of the homepage to start that process.

So, go check it out - we are very open to feedback and feature requests right now. There's a way to submit those right from the site itself and while I can't commit to making every change that is suggested, we will be keeping track of similar requests and making changes accordingly.

I graduated last spring, and around 200 applications later, this is the first offer I have received. The offer has a deadline in three days, so I need to decide quickly. I’m still interviewing for real engineer roles, but the only offer I’ve got is a Production Technician job that pays $22/hr.

Biggest turn-off is the schedule. It’s 12 hour shifts alternating days and nights, so 4 days on, 4 days off, 4 nights on, 4 days off. The interviewer told me several times that I’m overqualified, and that they wouldn’t have expected me to apply after having put so much time and money into a degree.

It’s not a job I’m excited about, and I’m still interviewing for jobs that would offer $80k with much easier hours. But it’s still an offer, and I’ve had none so far. If I turn it down, chances are that I’ll still be unemployed in another 6 months, relying on my parents for support.

What would you do?