CHISA 2014 – Worldwide Chemical Engineers Meet in the Heart of Europe

Abstract

Imagine a perfect chemical engineering scenario. At the beginning, you, a chemical engineer, in the lab together with your colleague, an organic chemist, come up with a formula and process for a product that will make the customer happy. The lab-scale synthesis is not straightforward; it includes granular powder, multiphase flow and harsh conditions. The production scale is multi-ton per year and the product is expected on the market soon. In the past, a similar scale-up from the lab to the production would have meant a tedious if not impossible work, pilot plant tests, and a portion of good luck to deliver the production process in time. This time, you use the multi-scale numerical simulation to transfer the multiphase flow from the lab to the reactor scale at once and to design the optimized continuous reactor geometry at the same time. Using the process intensification guidelines, you select the proper heat exchanger with micro-structured elements and calculate the operating expenses. The product is at the market soon, profits are high, customers are happy. The job is well done. This might sound like fiction, but it is not that farfetched as will be documented with this special issue of Chemical Engineering & Technology, which is dedicated to the International Congress on Chemical Engineering CHISA 2014, held in Prague, Czech Republic, indeed in the heart of Europe. The CHISA 2014 congress traditionally addressed the full spectrum of chemical and process engineering practice, including the current trends and future needs in reaction engineering, catalysis, separation processes, fluid flow and multiphase systems, computer aided engineering, and other engineering fields. Ten specialized symposia were organized to cover the broader research areas such as environmental engineering, food processes, biotechnology, process intensification miniaturization and others. Due to the high number of quality contributions, another CHISA 2014 focus issue is in consideration for publication in Chemical Engineering & Technology later this year. During a CHISA 2014 plenary, Prof. Wei Ge presented a systematic co-design of the physical model, numeric software and computer hardware conducted by his team at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. This approach can be applied in multi-scale simulations of discrete systems at different levels from molecular dynamics to multiphase fluid flow with micron-scale particles at reactor scale. Prof Ge believes that with further optimization of the model and algorithm, the speed and scale of discrete simulation can be elevated again by several orders in the near future, resulting in real-time simulation of industrial systems without scarifying its resolution and accuracy. That means the virtual reality of industrial processes is turning from fiction to practice. More details can be found in the related article in this issue. In one of many CHISA 2014 keynote lectures, Alberto Simoncelli (PrimaRatio) explored the frontiers of processing, mentioning the concurrent early formulation and processing, timescale management, and fast, lean and targeted approach. I believe that challenging these frontiers with the research, approaches, and methodologies not only presented at CHISA 2014, but also published in Chemical Engineering & Technology in general, we can pursue the chemical engineering scenarios similar to the one described above. I want to thank the CHISA 2014 Scientific Committee and Organizing Committee for providing an excellent information-exchange platform for engineers, scientists, technologists, students and others. The journey has already started. Welcome to the chemical engineering of the 21st century. Jiri Kristal Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals, Czech Academy of Sciences