TALKING PLANTS and crystal balls

Talking to plants might be a calling-card of heirs to the throne and other new-age types, but it could become commonplace for chemical engineers within the next 25 years. That's not to say that a taste for the fanciful is to take hold of this notably prosaic profession; rather, the development of voice-activated interfaces for instrumentation and control systems was one of the more startling predictions presented at this year's Institution of Chemical Engineers Research Event, which marked the institution's 75th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the granting of its Royal Charter.

Predictions were thick on the ground at Nottingham University, whose conference centre hosted the event. At this postgraduate student-dominated gathering, such activity is not so much idle speculation as career planning. However, among the research papers and poster presentations, several industrial luminaries were keen to present their view of the future.

Tom Edgar, president of the IChemE's transatlantic cousin, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, put forward several ideas to go with his voice-interface prediction. Environmental constraints are set to have a marked effect on the industry, he said: the AIChE believes that, by 2020, around two-thirds of all processes will be designed and operated to produce no waste or emissions, around a fifth will use at least one recycled feedstock, and half of all processes that currently depend on organic solvents will switch to aqueous materials. Moreover, about a tenth of all processes will use what today's engineers regard as `non-traditional chemistry', such as plasma or supercritical fluids.

The onward march of computing technology will also leave its mark on the industry. Not only will engineers be having conversations with valves, said Edgar, they'll also have to get used to being trained by expert systems, especially in health and safety matters. Another upcoming development is control systems with neural networks that will be able to learn how to handle and correct most of the incidents that crop up on site. This will mean that safety specialists will generally only be needed on-site when problems crop up for the first time.

Such predictions look outlandish, but are totally feasible, Edgar insisted. `The computer systems we were using to run a plant 25 years ago had less computing power than today's camcorders,' he pointed out.

Edgar echoed some of the remarks from the IChemE Jubilee Programme's opening event, a process engineering `Question Time'. Panel member Al Sacco, head of chemical engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US and a former Space Shuttle astronaut, believes that improved information storage will help usher in a new age. Julia Higgins, professor of polymer science at Imperial College London, predicted that companies will move towards a `small is beautiful' mentality, with smaller plants making smaller amounts of customised products, which will lead to an increase in the number of smaller firms. Ramesh Mashelkar, director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in India and a member of the committee of enquiry into the Bhopal disaster, saw the industry developing its environmental and social conscience with the development of `cleaner, leaner and greener' technologies and a move towards interdisciplinary cooperation, even with social scientists. And Peter Davidson, head of research and technology for Tioxide, foresaw the advent of `global teamworking', with the daunting prospect of `getting people face-to-face on VDUs.'

The problem of public perception was also much on people's minds. Mashelkar blamed `chemophobia' for Greenpeace's campaign to ban organic chlorine, although he conceded that industry should look for substitutes wherever possible. Sacco pointed out that such ignorance was surprisingly widespread - NASA originally decreed that the Shuttle could only carry liquids of pH between 6-7.5, until he pointed out that that would remove orange juice from the breakfast menu.

However, nobody could come up with a solution to this perennial problem. In fact, the panellists said that environmental decisions should often be `society-driven' rather than dictated solely by cost-benefit analysis. `If people are genuinely worried about something, then that has to be seen as a cost,' commented Higgins. `Politicians should not automatically rush down every society-driven path, but eventually they do have to go down society's route.'

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