The conceptual design approach - A process integration approach on the move

This paper offers a vision-review on current activities and new developments in the area of process integration and industrial resources management. It focuses on the conceptual process design approach and offers comments on recent tendencies in chemical engineering and process systems engineering practice, reporting a few new extensions of pinch analysis. The discussion is extended to the area of combined resources management starting with the simultaneous energy and water conservation with a specific emphasis on the evaluation of environmental impact of process integration activities introducing the oxygen-pinch and the emergy-pinch concepts. It further expands the analysis into the direction of multiple resources management trying to find a common ground for analysis of different resources. A challenging new process integration research area for the application of the conceptual design approach in the field of micro devices and micro bio-medical systems design is also discussed. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.