Chemical Engineering
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50 free Chemical Engineering trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Chemical engineering is the craft of turning a reaction that works in a flask into a plant that runs around the clock. It sits behind fuel, fertilizer, plastics, clean water and most medicines, and its history is full of happy accidents, wartime crash programmes and a few disasters that changed how factories are designed. This quiz covers the ground a student meets early on: balances of mass and energy, how fluids flow, how mixtures are separated, what goes on inside a reactor, and the thermodynamics that decides whether a process is possible at all. Other questions look at the landmark industrial processes, the equipment you would see on a plant tour, and the people who founded the profession. It opens with easier questions, including some well-known faces who studied the subject before finding fame elsewhere, and the later ones will test a chemical engineering undergraduate revising for an exam. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something. Play online, or print the questions for a class or a society quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which supermodel won a chemical engineering scholarship to Northwestern but left after one quarter to model?
Cindy Crawford
Cindy Crawford had graduated as valedictorian of DeKalb High School in Illinois in 1984. Her first cover, shot in her junior year there, was for a local weekly.
Q 02Which actor who played Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV holds a master's degree in chemical engineering?
Dolph Lundgren
Dolph Lundgren earned the master's at the University of Sydney in 1982, after a first degree at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Q 03Which drug did engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau scale up in deep fermentation tanks for Pfizer in World War II?
Penicillin
Penicillin reached large-scale production through her deep-tank fermentation of the mould. In 1945 she became the first woman accepted as an active member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Q 04Which diaper brand did chemical engineer Victor Mills invent after tiring of changing his grandchild's cloth ones?
Pampers
Pampers was the world's first widely marketed disposable diaper. Mills also improved the production of Ivory soap and oversaw the development of Pringles for Procter & Gamble.
Q 05Which material, later used to seal uranium pipes in the Manhattan Project, did Roy Plunkett find by accident in 1938?
Teflon
Teflon appeared as a whitish powder inside a pressurised gas cylinder that seemed to have emptied itself. Chemists found the waxy material oddly slippery, which is why it now lines frying pans.
Q 06Which That '70s Show star studied biochemical engineering at Iowa, hoping to cure his twin brother's heart condition?
Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher chose the major because his fraternal twin, Michael, had needed a heart transplant as a child. A model scout approached him in an Iowa City bar during his time there.
Q 07Which life-saving treatment did Dutch doctor Willem Kolff pioneer in 1943 with a machine built from sausage casings?
Dialysis
Dialysis cleans the blood by letting waste pass through a thin membrane, here the sausage casing. Kolff's machine, also made of juice cans and car parts, first saved a patient in 1945.
Q 08Which astronaut, the first African American woman in space, left Stanford with a degree in chemical engineering?
Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison entered Stanford at 16, later qualified as a doctor at Cornell, and flew aboard the shuttle Endeavour in 1992.
Q 09Which fibre from Wallace Carothers's lab debuted in toothbrush bristles in 1938, then became a hit in stockings?
Nylon
Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year on the market. The first 4,000 pairs offered to the public, in Wilmington, Delaware, were gone within three hours.
Q 10Which gas, squeezed until it acts partly like a liquid, do decaf producers use to wash caffeine out of coffee beans?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide held above its critical point becomes a supercritical fluid, midway between a gas and a liquid, which dissolves the caffeine. Kurt Zosel of the Max Planck Institute developed the method.
Q 11Which metal, also prized in jewellery, is the most active catalyst in the honeycomb of a car's catalytic converter?
Platinum
Platinum coats a ceramic core inside the converter, where it helps turn poisonous exhaust gases and unburned fuel into less harmful ones. Its high cost is one reason it does not suit every design.
Q 12Which Indian city suffered the world's worst industrial disaster in 1984 when a pesticide plant leaked toxic gas?
Bhopal
Bhopal saw more than 500,000 people exposed to methyl isocyanate, a gas about twice as dense as air that sank toward the ground. Union Carbide paid $470 million in 1989 to settle the claims.
Q 13Which separation process, also used to make whisky and rum, splits crude oil into fuels by their boiling points?
Distillation
Q 21Which yellow-green gas, used to disinfect pools and make PVC, do factories produce by passing electricity through brine?
Chlorine
Chlorine leaves the brine cell alongside hydrogen and caustic soda, two more products industry wants. The method first worked on a commercial scale some 90 years after the reaction was seen in 1800.
Q 22Which law of thermodynamics, the basis of every plant energy balance, says energy can be neither created nor destroyed?
First law
First law reasoning lets engineers account for all the heat and work crossing a reactor's boundary. It is the principle of conservation of energy applied to thermodynamic processes.
Q 23Which General Electric chief executive, in charge from 1981 to 2001, held a PhD in chemical engineering from Illinois?
Jack Welch
Distillation works because each hydrocarbon boils at a different temperature, so outlets at intervals up a refinery column draw off different fuels. Before World War II most American refineries did little else.
Q 14Which compound, the basis of most nitrogen fertilizers, does the Haber–Bosch process make from air and natural gas?
Ammonia
Ammonia made this way accounts for 1–2% of the world's energy use. Fritz Haber won a Nobel Prize for the chemistry in 1918, and Carl Bosch won one in 1931 for the high-pressure engineering.
Q 15Which microorganism do brewers and biofuel plants alike rely on to turn sugar into ethanol in fermentation tanks?
Yeast
Yeast carries out the conversion without oxygen, which is why fermentation counts as an anaerobic process. Louis Pasteur proved that living cells, rather than a chemical catalyst, do the work.
Q 16Which process, patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844, made natural rubber tough enough for tyres and shoe soles?
Vulcanization
Vulcanization was named after Vulcan, the Roman god linked with heat and volcanoes, at the suggestion of a friend of Goodyear's English rival. It works by forming cross-links between the rubber's long chains.
Q 17Which term describes fluids such as ketchup, which runs when shaken, and cornstarch paste, which stiffens when struck?
Non-Newtonian
Non-Newtonian fluids change how easily they flow when a force is applied, unlike water. Custard, toothpaste, paint, blood and shampoo all belong to the group.
Q 18Which fluid property, measured in pascal-seconds or poise, explains why honey pours far more slowly than water?
Viscosity
Viscosity is often quoted in poise, a unit named after Jean Poiseuille, a French physiologist who studied how blood flows through narrow tubes.
Q 19Which phase change does freeze-drying rely on to remove frozen water from instant coffee and astronaut meals?
Sublimation
Sublimation turns ice straight into vapour without melting it, which happens once the frozen food is put under low pressure. Freeze-dried meals became a staple of astronaut and military rations.
Q 20Which gas, the main ingredient of natural gas, is chilled to about −162 °C so tankers can carry it as a liquid?
Methane
Methane cooled into liquefied natural gas takes up about 1/600th of the space it fills as a gas, which is what makes shipping it across oceans worthwhile.
Jack Welch joined GE in 1960 as a junior chemical engineer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and nearly quit a year later over a small raise. He went on to become its youngest chairman.
Q 24Which director of It's a Wonderful Life graduated in chemical engineering from the college now known as Caltech?
Frank Capra
Frank Capra paid his way through college by playing banjo in nightclubs and cleaning engines at a power plant. After leaving Hollywood he made educational science films with his old university.
Q 25Which plastic, the most commonly produced of all, was found by accident at an ICI works in Northwich, England, in 1933?
Polyethylene
Polyethylene took two more years to tame. ICI chemist Michael Perrin turned the 1933 fluke into a repeatable high-pressure recipe in 1935, and industrial production began in 1939.
Q 26Which chemical company built and ran the Hanford plutonium works for the Manhattan Project without taking a profit?
DuPont
DuPont insisted on receiving no payment, so that it could not be labelled a merchant of death as it had been after World War I. The Army chose the firm for its record of building explosives plants.
Q 27Which metal's smelting process did Charles Hall and Paul Héroult, both born in 1863, discover independently in 1886?
Aluminium
Aluminium is freed by passing electricity through its oxide dissolved in molten cryolite. Hall's cheap method made it the first metal to come into widespread use since iron.
Q 28Which chemical, known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is made by the contact process and used mostly for fertilizer?
Sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid output was long treated as a gauge of a nation's industrial strength. The contact process that makes it was patented in 1831 by a British vinegar merchant, Peregrine Phillips.
Q 29Which refinery process, patented by Russia's Vladimir Shukhov in 1891, breaks long hydrocarbon chains into shorter ones?
Cracking
Cracking lets a refinery turn the heavy, low-value end of a barrel of oil into smaller, more useful molecules such as those in gasoline. Shukhov's 1891 patent was one of the first for a thermal version.
Q 30Which membrane process, best known for making drinking water from seawater, forces water through under high pressure?
Reverse osmosis
Reverse osmosis applies enough pressure to overcome water's natural tendency to flow toward the saltier side of a membrane. The salt stays behind on the pressurised side.