Ingenierio Quimico

Chemical Engineering Journal 134 (2007) 84–92

In the frame of globalization and sustainability, process intensification, a path to the future of chemical and process engineering (molecules into money)
Jean-Claude Charpentier a,b,∗
a

Laboratoire des Sciences du G´ nie Chimique, CNRS/ENSIC/INPL, Nancy, France e b Ecole Sup´ rieure de Chimie Physique Electronique de Lyon, France e

AbstractIn 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 acontext 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, ormicroengineering 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 andautomation, 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 concurrentproduct/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. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Future of chemicalengineering; Process intensification; Multifunctional reactors; New operating modes of production; Microengineering; Microtechnologies

1. Introduction To satisfy both the market requirements for specific enduse properties of the products manufactured in (bio) chemical reactors or catalytic reactors, and the social, and the raw material and energy savings, and environmental constraints of theindustrial-scale processes and technologies, it has been shown that a necessary progress is coming via a multidisciplinary and time and length multiscale approach (the molecular processes, product, process engineering (3PE) approach) [1]. So organizing scales and complexity levels in chemical and pro-

cess engineering is now necessary to understand and to describe the relationships between events atnano- and microscales to better convert molecules into useful products at the process scale in the plant-scale production site. For example Fig. 1 [1] presents schematically the different length scales concerned in organizing levels of complexity to translate molecular processes into phenomenological macroscopic laws in order to create and to control the end-use properties and functionality ofproducts manufactured by a batch or continuous process. In the frame of globalization and sustainability, the future of chemical engineering can be summarized in four main objectives [1]: (a) Increase productivity and selectivity through intensification of intelligent operations and a multiscale approach to processes control (e.g., nano- or microtailoring of catalyst materials).

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