Process Intensification Essay

3259 Words14 Pages
PROCESS INTENSIFICATION Introduction Process intensification in the chemical process industry is a very recent subject in the field of chemical engineering. The concept is hardly a decade old. It is a highly innovative concept in the design of chemical process plants. The aim of intensification is to optimize capital, energy, environmental and safety benefits by radical reduction in the physical size of the plant. Thus the concept is intimately connected with the physical nature of the plant and not something which will take a long time to move from theory to final commercial application using existing and available hardware. In other words process intensification consists of the development of novel apparatuses and techniques, as compared to the present state-of-art, to bring dramatic improvements in manufacturing and processing, substantially decreasing equipment size/production-capacity ratio, energy consumption, or waste production. Perhaps a simpler definition could be; any chemical engineering development that leads to a substantially smaller, cleaner, and more energy-efficient technology is process intensification. There is a caveat to the definition: development of a new chemical route or a change in composition of a catalyst, no matter how dramatic the improvements they bring to existing technology, do not qualify as process intensification. A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROCESS INTENSIFICATION In the scientific literature, the term process intensification started to appearing the mid-1960s and early ’70s, mostly in East European publications concerning metallurgical processing (4–7) (an interesting coincidence, considering that Agricola’s book was also on metallurgy, not on chemical processing). Of course,all of those papers understood process intensification as simply equivalent to process improvement. Also, in the first chemical industry–oriented articles

More about Process Intensification Essay

Open Document