Chemical engineering, sustainability and innovation - Challenges and prospects

Process engineering covers all the sciences and technologies that enable the optimal physical and chemical transformation of raw materials and energy into products that are useful to consumers.

To meet the needs of the chemical and ancillary industries, which have to satisfy changing economic demands while remaining globally competitive, modern process engineering has to address both market demand for products with defined usage properties on nano and micro scales of time and space, and the social and environmental constraints of industrial processes on meso and macro scales of production. It must meet the challenge of proposing processes incorporating sustainable technologies for green products.

We'll see that this requires a scientific approach based on an integrated, multi-disciplinary, multi-length and multi-time-scale system approach, applied to the various molecular and often coupled transfer processes involved at the different scales of the chemical production chain: in other words, a clear understanding of how phenomena at one scale determine properties and behavior at the next, from the molecular scale right through to the production site scales.

We will also see that this multi-scale approach, the green approach to process engineering, which combines both a market pull and a technology push, is being pursued with four main objectives that are strongly focused on process intensification and the engineering of the "green products/green processes" pair.

The aim is to produce much more and better while consuming much less, and to produce more sustainable molecules that meet environmental and economic challenges with innovative technologies and processes leading to better use of raw materials and energy.