Microprocess engineering, process intensification and multiscale design

Maintaining a competitive and sustainable chemical industry in a changing global society is one of the major challenges facing the industrial economy in the 21st century. The necessary radical innovation in the design and operation of chemical production facilities across the world will require novel high-performance devices for a new generation of chemical-plant equipment. In the last decade, creative, innovative solutions for flexible and intensified production equipment such as microreactors, compact heat exchangers, thin-film devices and other micro- and / or meso-structured components have been proposed, and these new devices hold promise for step-change improvement in future industrial performance. Novelty in individual devices and process components alone, however, will not be sufficient. Turning new technological options into true industrial reality requires methods and tools capable of evaluating the true contribution of individual device improvements to performance enhancement for complete production systems. New design methods, new business strategies and new production paradigms are therefore an urgent necessity. These new methods must consider integration and inter-connection of small-scale devices and components (MICROsystems) in large-scale production processes (MACROsystems). Reliable methods for such «MULTI-SCALE design are therefore a key to world-wide industrial competitiveness and sustainable development. Recently launched research efforts in Europe (the IMPULSE project) and in Japan (the MCPT project) are beginning to address the development of multi-scale design tools, with application in most cases to traditional chemical synthesis. For the next decade, a new challenge will be to extend the multi-scale design paradigm to the development of flexible, high-performance methods not only for traditional synthesis, but for precision formulation of product properties, in rapid response to changing market demands. This new field of «intensified product engineering will require close collaboration between engineers, physical chemists and economists and opens new horizons for the future of chemical engineering research.