Educating on Process Intensification

Process intensification (PI) is a new archetype of the chemical industry that struggles to find its place despite its indisputable advantages. PI targets order of magnitude improvements to manufacture chemicals by retooling existing facilities with the help of smaller, more efficient breakthrough technologies. New generations of scientists and engineers need appropriate tools to cope with the interesting changes taking place in the chemical industry. To best serve industry and therefore society, our education system must respond quickly to the ongoing paradigm shift of chemical industry.

Indeed, the pedagogical vehicles to educate undergraduate and graduate students to this recent engineering approach is still lacking clarity and focus, together with the specification of the essential tools required. Besides helping to bridge this gap between agnostics and PI promoters, the necessity to tackle the topic of entrepreneurship through innovative educational methods has not yet been addressed by a dedicated forum such as the one we propose in our meeting.

Therefore, this workshop will deal with:

i)             Societal aspects of educating at all levels in PI

ii)           Process intensifying equipment and methods: where are we, where will we go from here?

iii)          Interventions by instructors/teachers of PI courses

iv)          Educational methods and tools for chemical engineering programs: how can we grow the curriculum? What should its dynamic be?

The goal of this meeting is to identify with all participants how to ensure excellence in the education on Process Intensification within Chemical Engineering curricula at Universities and long-life education of professionals within industry.