Among the trends for a modern chemical engineering: CAPE an efficient tool for process intensification and product design and engineering

Abstract

To respond to the changing needs of the chemical and related industries in order both to meet the today's economy demands and to remain competitive in global trade, a modern chemical engineering is vital to satisfy both the market requirements for specific nano and-micro scale end-use properties of products, and the social and environmental constraints of industrial meso and-macro scale processes. Thus an integrated system approach of complex multidisciplinary, non-linear, non-equilibrium processes and phenomena occurring on different length and time scales of the supply chain, from molecular-scale to the production-scales, is required. A modern chemical engineering can be summarized by four main objectives: (1) Increase productivity and selectivity through intensification of intelligent operations and a multi scale approach to processes control: nano and micro-tailoring of materials with controlled structure; (2) Design novel equipment based on scientific principles and new production methods: process intensification using multifunctional reactors and micro-engineering for micro structured equipment; (3) Extend chemical engineering methodology to product design and engineering using the “triplet molecular Processes-Product-Process Engineering (3PE)” approach; (4) Implement multiscale application of computational chemical engineering modelling and simulation to real-life situations from the molecular scale to the production scale, e.g., in order to understand how phenomena at a smaller length scale relate to properties and behaviour at a longer length scale. The present publications will emphasis the multidisciplinary and multiscale approach of chemical engineering and the unique role of CAPE for investigations in the previous objectives.