Structure, Energy, Synergy, Time—The Fundamentals of Process Intensification

Process intensification (PI) is commonly seen as one of the most promising development paths for the chemical process industry and one of the most important progress areas for modern chemical engineering. Often illustrated with spectacular examples, process intensification struggles, however, with its definition and interpretation. Instead of narrowing the scientific discussion down to finding a commonly accepted definition of PI, it is more important to determine its position within chemical engineering and to identify its fundamentals. Accordingly, the paper presents a fundamental vision on process intensification. The vision encompasses four approaches in spatial, thermodynamic, functional, and temporal domains, which are used to realize four generic principles of PI. The approaches refer to all scales existing in chemical processes, from molecular to meso- and macroscale, and are illustrated with relevant examples with special attention given to the molecular scale.