3. Obstacles and future prospects for process intensification

It goes without saying that process intensification is a way forward for the modern approach to process engineering and for the development of sustainable processes, as part of an approach that combines both a market pull and a technology push.

However, a number of major hurdles must and will have to be overcome before certain new technologies in equipment and reactor design for process intensification are further exploited and their uses even more widespread than they are today.

We need to prove, for example, that the maturity and economic competitiveness of these new technologies are comparable to those of conventional technologies. This is why, for example, despite their many advantages, the potential uses of multifunctional separation processes are barely being exploited on an industrial scale, with the exception of catalytic distillation...