Chemical product engineering: An emerging paradigm within chemical engineering

Abstract

New product development is a crucial task for modern corporations. Facing an increasingly competitive and dynamic market, the ability to continuously identify customer needs and create products that meet such needs is essential to business success. As a result, researchers from fields such as management, marketing, industrial design and engineering have devoted their attention to new product development issues, and many references can be found in the literature covering this topic.1-5 New product development combines strategic and organizational actions with technical effort; the former dealing with the management of the development process, strategic placement and launch of the new product; the latter being chiefly concerned with the design of the product and its manufacturing process. While in some industrial and engineering sectors, such as mechanical and electronic, the technical side of the development process has always been appreciated as a major issue, in the chemical process industries the systematic and efficient design of new products is a relatively recent concern. However, these industries, with chemical engineering as their technical support, seem to be making up for lost time, and chemical product engineering is a fast developing concept among both industrial and scientific communities. The aim of this article is to provide a review of the scope of chemical product engineering by discussing its emergence within chemical engineering. Chemical Engineering: Present and Future