Process Intensification (PI) is an effective way to enhance process efficiency and sustainability at affordable costs and efforts, attracting particular interest in the European area, as one of the most important chemical production areas in the world. PI primarily contributes by developing and testing new processing technologies that once integrated within a process improve the overall process performance substantially but as a result, it may alter the overall process (flowsheet) structure and its dynamic behavior. As such PI plays a key role in improving energy efficiency, optimizing resource allocation, and reducing environmental impact of industrial processes, and thereby leading to a cost-effective, eco-efficient, low-carbon and sustainable industry. However, along with opportunities, the PI new technologies have challenges related to failures in longer-term performance. In this respect, Process Systems Engineering (PSE) stance is more on integration aspects of new PI technologies into processes by making process (re)designs, doing operability studies, and performance optimizations within a supply chain setting. PSE contributes to overcoming the challenges by providing systematic approaches for the design and optimization of PI technologies. This perspective paper is a lightly referenced scholarly opinion piece about the status and directions of process intensification field from a PSE viewpoint. Primarily, it focuses on PSE perspectives towards sustainable lower energy usage process systems and provides a brief overview of the current situation in Europe. It also emphasizes the key challenges and opportunities for (new) PI technologies considering their integration in a process in terms of process synthesis and design, process flowsheet optimization, process and plantwide control, (green) electrification, sustainability improvements. Potential research directions on these aspects are given from an industrial and academic perspective of the authors.

Process Systems Engineering (PSE) is a discipline that deals with decision-making, at all levels and scales, by understanding any complex process system using a holistic view and a systems thinking framework. A closely related discipline (considered usually a part of PSE) is the Computer Aided Process Engineering (CAPE) which is a complementary field that focuses on developing methods and providing solution through systematic computer aided techniques for problems related to the design, control and operation of chemical systems. Nowadays, the ‘PSE’ term suffers from a branding issue to the point that PSE no longer gets the recognition that it deserves. In chemical engineering education the integrative systems frame for process design, control and operations is virtually absent. Its application potential in process industry lags relative to academic research progress and results. This work aims to provide an informative industrial and academic perspective on PSE (focused on the European region), arguing that the ‘systems thinking’ and ‘systems problem solving’ have to be given priority over just applications of computational problem solving methods. A multi-level view of the PSE field is provided within the academic and industrial context, and enhancements for PSE are suggested at their industrial and academic interfaces to create win-win situations.

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a gas-phase coating technique that can be used to coat nanoparticles in a fluidized bed reactor. ALD is based on the alternating supply of two precursors, which makes it an inherent dynamic process. We discuss a multi-scale, multiphase mass transfer-diffusion-reaction model capable of predicting the evolution of surface coverage of particles at different local operating conditions. The dynamic ALD-reactor model can be extended with operational scenarios. The reactor design combined with the scenarios has many degrees of freedom, yielding ample opportunities to optimize the process with efficient utilization of precursors.

In this work, we develop a mixed integer linear optimization model that can be used to select appropriate sources, capture technologies, transportation network and CO₂ storage sites and optimize for a minimum overall cost for a nationwide CO₂ emission reduction in the Netherlands. Five different scenarios are formulated by varying the location of source and storage sites available in the Netherlands. The results show that the minimum overall cost of all scenarios is €47.8 billion for 25 years of operation and 54Mtpa capture of CO₂. Based on the investigated technologies, this work identifies Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) as the most efficient for post-combustion CO₂ capture in the Netherlands. The foremost outcome of this study is that the capture and compression is the dominant force contributing to a majority of the cost.

The ¹³C-labeling technique was introduced in the field of metabolic engineering as a tool for determining fluxes that could not be found using the 'classical' method of flux balancing. An a priori flux identifiability analysis is required in order to determine whether a ¹³C-labeling experiment allows the identification of all the fluxes. In this article, we propose a method for identifiability analysis that is based on the recently introduced 'cumomer' concept. The method improves upon previous identifiability methods in that it provides a way of systematically reducing the metabolic network on the basis of structural elements that constitute a network and to use the implicit function theorem to analytically determine whether the fluxes in the reduced network are theoretically identifiable for various types of real measurement data. Application of the method to a realistic flux identification problem shows both the potential of the method in yielding new, interesting conclusions regarding the identifiability and its practical limitations that are caused by the fact that symbolic calculations grow fast with the dimension of the studied system.