The triplet "molecular processes-product-process" engineering: the future of chemical engineering ?

Today chemical engineering has to answer to the changing needs of the chemical and related process industries and to meet the market demands. Being a key to survival in globalization of trade and competition, the evolution of chemical engineering is thus necessary. Its ability to cope with the scientific and technological problems encountered will be appraised in this paper. To satisfy both the markets requirements for specific end-use properties of products and the social and environmental constraints of the industrial-scale processes, it is shown that a necessary progress is coming via a multidisciplinary and a time and length multiscale approach. This will be obtained due to breakthroughs in molecular modelling, scientific instrumentation and related signal processing and powerful computational tools. For the future of chemical engineering four main objectives are concerned: (a) to increase productivity and selectivity through intelligent operations via intensification and multiscale control of processes; (b) to design novel equipment based on scientific principles and new methods of production: process intensification; (c) to extend chemical engineering methodology to product focussed engineering, i.e. manufacturing and synthesizing end-use properties required by the customer, which needs a triplet "molecular processes-product-process" engineering; (d) to implement multiscale application of computational chemical engineering modelling and simulation to real-life situations, from the molecular scale to the overall complex production scale. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.