2. Identifying limitations and strategies

2.1 Nature of limitations

To intensify a process, it's obviously essential to first carry out a precise diagnosis to identify the limiting stages. This simple, common-sense principle is not without its pitfalls. For example, in the well-known case of chemical kinetics identified as slow, because they are wrongly assimilated to the pouring of a reagent during an experiment carried out in a fed batch, for obvious safety reasons, to avoid any thermal runaway.

Generally speaking, limitations are either chemical (transformation), physical (transfer phenomena) or both.

In the first case, we say that we are in the chemical regime, and we have to resort to new catalysts, new access routes, new operating windows (pressure, temperature, reaction...