Process intensification challenges

Rijkens HC. Membrane developments for natural gas conditioning. Syllabus Second Dutch Symposium Process Intensification A Challenge for the Process Industry. November 2000. 

Fine chemicals are generally produced in large-scale batch reactors. However, in the past few years, a trend toward process intensification can be observed and more and more continuous production processes appear. Besides the advantage of a better reaction selectivity, these types of manufacturing processes also offer a lot of opportunities and challenges for engineers to combine continuous synthesis with a continuous purification method. 

H. Perez, R. Sinclair, P. Hancock and J. G. Lenz, Recent Process Intensification Efforts at the Brunswick Lead smelter . Challenges in Process IntensificatioiL C.A Pickles, P.J. Hancock and J.R. Wynnyckyj, Eds., The Metallurgical Society of CIM, Montreal, Canada, 19%, 247-265. 

R. Li, M. Zamalloa and P. Hancock, Zinc Fuming from Iron Oxysulfide Melts , Challenges in Process Intensification. C. A. Pickles et al., Eds., Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum, Montreal, Canada, 1996,24-29. 

Given the very significant advances indicated previously on individual small-scale structured devices on the laboratory scale, the major challenge facing the chemical industry in order to perform sustainable process intensification is not the further development of individual locally structured units but rather the effective integration of those units into complete production systems, exhibiting the required multi-scale features described above. 

For each of these intensification challenges, the objective to be reached (volume reduction, reduced size/capadty ratio, etc.), and also the constraints (fixed productivity, fixed performance, quality specifications, etc.) can be identified and quantified with respect to technical and economic data. Unfortunately, the means to tackle these issues are much more complex to define since they can be of very different natures operating conditions (temperature, pressure, concentrations, etc.), physical or chemical parameters (solvents, catalysts, etc.), equipment (heat exchangers, mixers, columns, etc.), process parameters (reflux ratio, feed strategy of semi-batch reactors, separate unit operations or multi-functional reactors, separator types, etc.). In... 

Muralidhara, H.S. (2006). Role of process intensification in food and bioprocessing for the 21st century challenges and opportunities. Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Process Intensification and Innovation, Christchurch, New Zealand, September 24-29. 

The model can be used for process intensification, since it provides information about the effect of temperature, concentrations, and wood chip sizes on the cooking time required. A more comprehensive treatment can be found, for example, in Refs. [35,36]. As can be seen, classical chemical engineering concepts are applicable and can be successfully adapted in cases of very complex natural materials. The main challenge of the model development is the description of the chemical system. However, it is expected that the delignification reactors of future, the digesters, will be designed on the basis of rational chemical engineering principles. 

Chaper 9 by Sharma et al., fix)m India is concerned with basic research challenges and commercial successes achieved in a wide range of C-C and C-0 bond forming reactions with transition metal catalysis. It also highlights the process intensification efforts of various kinds needed to achieve improved yields and selectivities. It is interesting to note that several innovative reactions developed by Nobel Laureates and well-known research groups in the world have received industrial acceptance due to their innovation content. 

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