In the frame of globalization and sustainability, process intensification, a path to the future of chemical and process engineering (molecules into money)

Abstract

Abstract In today's economy, chemical and process engineering must respond to the changing needs of the chemical processes and related industries in order to satisfy both the increasing market requirements for specific end-use properties of the product required by the customer, and the social, and the raw material and energy savings, and environmental constraints of the industrial-scale process. In such a context of globalization and sustainability and amongst several tracks, it is shown that process intensification is a path for the future of chemical and process engineering demands. Process intensification concerns the design of novel equipment based on scientific principles and new production methods and is obtained in using either multifunctional reactors, or new operating modes, or microengineering and microtechnology for both high throughput and formulation screening, and for chemical production. Thus process intensification leads to more or less complex technologies that replace large, expensive, energy-intensive equipment or processes with ones that are smaller, less costly, more efficient plants, minimizing environmental impact, increasing safety and improving remote control and automation, or that combine multiple operations into a single apparatus or into fewer devices. With the help of the multidisciplinary and multiscale approach of the chemical engineering applied from the scale of the microreaction technology up to the scale of multifunctional macroreactors or equipment, process intensification offers new opportunities for chemical engineering, e.g., in concurrent product/process or microprocess engineering which can offer strategic competitive advantage in speed to market, cost, and also production innovation. It is thus involved in the trend “molecules into money” which is based on the premise that chemical engineering drives today economy development and is fundamental to wealth creation.