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Emerging equipment, processing techniques, and operational methods promise spectacular improvements in process plants, markedly shrinking their size and dramatically boosting their efficiency. These developments may result in the extinction of some traditional types of equipment, if not whole unit operations.
Today, we are witnessing important new developments that go beyond "traditional" chemical engineering. Engineers at many universities and industrial research centers are working on novel equipment and techniques that potentially could transform our concept of chemical plants and lead to compact, safe, energy-efficient, and environment-friendly sustainable processes. These developments share a common focus on "process intensification" - an approach that has been around for quite some time but has truly emerged only in the past few years as a special and interesting discipline of chemical engineering.
In this article, we take a closer look at process intensification. We define what it involves, discuss its dimensions and structure, and review recent developments in process-intensifying devices and methods.
What is process intensification?
One of the woodcuts in the famous 16th century book by Georgius Agricola (1) illustrates the process of retrieving gold from gold ore (Figure 1). The resemblance between some of the devices shown in the picture (for instance, the stirred vessels 0 and the stirrers S) and the basic equipment of today's chemical process industries (CPI) is striking. Indeed, Agricola's drawing shows that process intensification, no matter how we define it, does not seem to have had much impact in the field of stirring technology over the last four centuries, or perhaps even longer. But, what actually is process intensification?
In 1995, while opening the Ist International Conference on Process Intensification in the Chemical Industry, Ramshaw, one of the pioneers in the field, defined process intensification as a strategy for making dramatic reductions in the size of a chemical plant so as to reach a given production objective (2). These reductions can come from shrinking the size of individual pieces of equipment and also from cutting the number of unit operations or apparatuses involved. In any case, the degree of reduction must be significant; how significant remains a matter of discussion. Ramshaw speaks about volume reduction on the order of 100 or more, which is quite a challenging number. In our view, a decrease...