Conceptual methods for synthesis of reactive distillation processes: recent developments and perspectives

Reactive distillation (RD) is a process intensification technique that offers major advantages over conventional technologies by enabling the integration of reaction and separation into a single apparatus. This integration introduces and exploits complex interaction between mass transfer, chemical reaction and hydrodynamics within an RD...

The life cycle of creative ideas: Towards a dual-process theory of ideation

Ideation is simultaneously one of the most investigated and most intriguing aspects of design. The reasons for this attention are partly due to its importance in design and innovation, and partly due to an array of conflicting results and explanations. In this study, we develop an integrative perspective on individual ideation by combining...

A method to reduce ambiguities of qualitative reasoning for conceptual design applications

Qualitative reasoning can generate ambiguous behaviors due to the lack of quantitative information. Despite many different research results focusing on ambiguities reduction, fundamentally it is impossible to totally remove ambiguities with only qualitative methods and to guarantee the consistency of results. This prevents the wide use of...

On the conceptual design of large-scale process & energy infrastructure systems integrating flexibility, reliability, availability, maintainability and economics (FRAME) performance metrics

The environment in which large-scale process and energy infrastructure systems operate is becoming more dynamic and subject to various uncertainties and disturbances. These challenge the engineers and designers to provide solutions and designs that are not only adaptive to a wide range of future conditions and requirements but are reliable.In...

Supporting conceptual product design by hybrid simulation of use processes with scenario structures

The approach described in this paper aims to offer designers a new way to investigate use processes of products by integrating scenarios of expected user behaviour with simulations of physical artefact behaviour. Use is considered a key process in the life cycle of a product, being the phase in which an instance of a product is put into service...

Nucleus-based product conceptualization - Part 2. Application in designing for use

when products are being designed, especially in conceptual design where there is a multitude of options for the designer. This paper presents a methodology to generate resource-integrated models unifying representations of the product, the user and the environment based on nucleus modelling, which is presented in Part 1 of this paper, according...