In recent years, several new methods have been developed to precisely manipulate small particles using optical, electric, acoustic, magnetic, or fluidic fields. Automated fluidic trapping has emerged as a particularly powerful method to control colloidal particles, cells, or single polymers using only fluid flow. Here, we discuss recent advances in the automation of particle manipulation, focusing

Polymer membranes are widely utilized in industrial separation processes. Along with numerous experiments conducted for gas and liquid separations, molecular simulations have also been performed to fundamentally elucidate separation mechanisms in polymer membranes. However, the simulation studies are mostly limited to gas and aqueous mixtures, and non-aqueous separations such as pervaporation and organic

Nowadays most membrane separation processes utilize membranes made from organic polymers because shape and structure can be tailored to the needs of a specific application with scalable fabrication processes such as solution casting and phase separation, coating and interfacial polymerization. This short review discusses recent progress for membranes suited for molecular separation in aqueous and organic

The increase in demand and high product diversification range with reduced unit quantities leads to the innovation of flexible and digitized production. The emerging concept, like Additive Manufacturing (AM), is extensively used to make a prototype with insufficient mechanical strength. For addressing this problem, advancement in the production of Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) composites is introduced

Ion selective separations are becoming increasingly important in many water and energy applications. Ion exchange membranes could address these separation challenges, but advanced understanding of the structure-property relationships that connect polymer chemistry and membrane morphology to selectivity properties is needed. Membrane-based ion separations can be driven by concentration or electric field

The melt pool dimensions and pool-shapes that are possible with directed beam-heating are explored with a collapsed parameter model, and compared with experimental results. The peak temperatures, temperature gradients and fluid flow velocities/cells are calculated for various beam parameters. The key solidification parameters including the interface velocity are discussed for various beam powers, beam

Additive manufacturing (AM) of metals and alloys opens tremendous opportunities in production of parts with complex shapes and geometries. One of the main challenges is formation of residual stress during fabrication processes which substantially affects service life of engineering components. This paper provides a brief introduction to different types, formation mechanisms, and measurement techniques

Additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing is an ideal technology for building flexible, complex, monolithic devices. Organs-on-chips (OOCs) are biomimetic microsystems that recapitulate the crucial structures and functions of human organs. Organ-level activities, mechanics and physiological response can be stimulated and investigated in OOCs. Convergence of AM technology along with OOCs offers a more

The chemical industry makes extensive use of solvents, especially for chemical reactions and separations. When considering the large number of existing solvents and the necessity for finding new and alternative ones, systematic methods for the optimal selection and molecular design of solvents become significant for efficient and sustainable chemical manufacturing. During the past decade, a substantial

Chemical industry is continuously looking for opportunities to manufacture the necessary commodity chemicals as well as to convert them into higher value-added chemicals-based products. Development of these chemicals-based products involves not only their design and/or selection but also their sustainable manufacturing through an appropriate chemical process, its marketing and its disposal as waste

This review paper presents some of the topics discussed at the 2018 ‘Chemical process development trends’ seminar organized by the Swiss Process and Chemical Engineers Society in Basel, Switzerland. The first subject covers the use of computer aided tools for systematic reaction route selection, the second one addresses the recent development in the field of process intensification with a focus on

Process intensification (PI) has been gaining increasing momentum in the chemical engineering research community and the chemical/energy industry. While many PI alternative technologies and their conventional counterparts exist, systematic approaches and tools to decide on the most promising intensified process solutions are currently rather lacking. Process Systems Engineering (PSE) can contribute

Process intensification (PI) is a branch of process synthesis that encompasses and impacts a number of process technologies. Research in PI has recently gained considerable attention due to challenges related to energy and the environment, alongside risks in capital investment decisions. These challenges necessitate the development of optimization-based computational tools for process synthesis and

Process Intensification promises novel solutions to current challenges in the chemical process industry, leading to a rapid growth in interest. There are different approaches to synthesize an intensified process, yet most are based on methods from Process Synthesis and Process Optimization. In this paper, we review those methods and provide an overview of their application in Process Intensification

Process systems engineering (PSE) tools can be utilized to enable the optimal operation and control of intensified processes. In this work, the challenges in the control of intensified processes are summarized, including the difficulties in modelling and performing online optimization of these highly complex dynamic systems. Nevertheless, PSE progress in the areas of nonlinear programming, reduced-order

Process intensification can afford considerable benefits with respect to economics, sustainability and/or safety but also presents increased decision making challenges with respect to computational efficiency and flexibility across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Distributed decision making, that is, localized yet coordinated decision making among constituent subsystems, is a promising approach

Product Design & Engineering (PDE) aims to define new and/or improved products based on customer needs and/or new technologies. A comprehensive discussion of PDE as a building block for chemical engineering education, research and practice seems still lacking, preventing a broader impact on academic and industry realities more and more concerned with the ‘knowledge economy’. The purpose of the present

In this work we provide an overview of the current trend in process and product design as a multidisciplinary area within process system engineering. This problem shows a strong link between different fields including economics, marketing, molecular chemistry, physico-chemistry as well as process design and all the way up to ingredients and final products supply chain. While the different stages in

In this minireview, electro-catalytic activation of some representative alcohols and greenhouse gases CO2 are taken as examples to comprehensively analyze the state of the art of electrocatalysis, and then recent research progress in the characterization techniques for electrocatalysis are also summarized, and several viewpoints on the further development of electrocatalysis are promoted in the end

Over the last couple of decades, the scientific community has made large efforts to process and store experimental and computational chemical data and information on the world wide web. This review summarizes several databases and ontologies available on the web for researchers to use. We also discuss briefly the categories of chemistry data that are stored, its main usage and how it can be accessed

Clathrate hydrates of natural gases show promise for energy in regions traditionally poor of fossil fuels, suggest the possibility of mitigating the atmospheric impact of hydrocarbon consumption via CO 2 sequestration, could advance high-tech applications to address global challenges, including the water-energy nexus, and can lead to significant economic loss and potential safety hazards when they

The control of microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) is of great significance in many industrial applications. Attention has been devoted to emerging nanomaterials as ‘green’ biocides for their remarkable antimicrobial function and relatively low environmental risk. Understanding the antimicrobial inhibition mechanisms is the key to increase the efficiency of nanoparticles and enhance the feasibility

Direct absorption-based solar collectors, which rely on volumetric absorption of sunlight by optical nanofluids, have emerged as a superior way to conventional surface absorption-based collectors for harvesting solar-thermal energy. In this short review, we summarize the recent progress on preparing medium-to-high-temperature solar-thermal nanofluids that can be potentially used in direct absorption-based

Ionic liquid (IL) including polymeric ionic liquid (PIL) is a rapidly growing and widely research area due to its unique properties such as non-volatility, high ionic conductivity, electrochemical stability, and solvation potential. This focused review covers the advancement of thermally responsive ILs/PILs for applications, in which their osmotic potential and reversible interactions are exploited

Recent advances in the development of advanced solar evaporation have opened up new possibilities for the revived explorations of solar thermal utilization. Among them, microstructure-enabled solar evaporation received the most attention due to its unique capability of solar energy harvesting and localized heating effects, which are beneficial for an enhanced vapor production rate, a fast-responsive

Seawater and brackish water desalination provides a viable alternative to clean water supply for regions lacking fresh water sources or facing severe droughts. Current desalination technologies, however, are energy-expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Mimicking the natural transpiration process of mangrove trees that are able to survive in high-salinity environment, an artificial tree is conceived

Artificial water channels (AWCs) are synthetic mimics of biological water channel proteins, aquaporins. They combine the characteristic features of aquaporins, including a transmembrane orientation in biomimetic membrane matrices and the possibility of combining high water permeability with high water/solute selectivity, with higher processability and stability compared to protein channels. AWCs have

Capacitive deionization (CDI), an emerging desalination technology, has received considerable attention in recent years due to porous carbon development, new cell designs, and unique operational modes providing higher performance for capacitance-based salt removal. The energy cost of this separation process has also been rigorously evaluated through a variety of efficiency calculations, and direct

Progress in molecular modeling for aerosol process design during synthesis of nanomaterials is highlighted for understanding, tuning, and eventually engineering their promising (and, often, only partially known) properties. Atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations unravel the fundamentals of the major physicochemical processes dominating the manufacture of these materials

This perspective paper gives a brief overview on the state of the art in group-contribution-based property estimation methods and their further development and use. These are simple methods, easy to use, have some predictive capabilities and are usually considered pragmatic engineering methods developed through representation of molecular structural information, analysis of available property data

Chemical and petrochemical companies are increasingly realizing that their sustainable development critically depends upon development of new innovative processes that use more efficiently materials and energy. As overall separation/purification processes account for 40–60% of capital and operating costs, their amelioration can significantly reduce costs, energy use and waste generation by increasing

Gas-phase synthesis of nanomaterials offers distinct advantages in large-scale manufacturing of commodities such as carbon blacks, ceramic oxides, semiconductors, and dielectric substances and facilitates the formation of highly pure materials with unique morphology that impact transportation, microelectronics, catalysis, biomedicine, and energy applications. Particle characteristics such as size,

One great challenge of nanotechnology concerns the design and synthesis of multi-component nanoparticles that beat the properties of their elemental counterparts. Cluster beam deposition (CBD) provides a solvent-free and effluent-free method to achieve nanomaterials with tailored characteristics. However, CBD is hindered by low cluster yield and, often, by limited structural control. In gas-phase methods

Rates of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation have been utilized in the characterization of natural and synthetic porous media, effectively providing an alternate form of porosimetry. The physical basis for characterization is the enhancement in relaxation rate associated with fluid surface interactions with contributions from paramagnetism, dipolar coupling and diffusion. While paramagnetism

The catalytic performance of zeolite is significantly influenced by the steric constraints and acid property of its active acid sites that resulted from the isomorphous substitution of aluminum (Al) for silicon (Si) in lattice sites. A clear understanding on the relationship of synthesis-Al distribution-catalytic property would be beneficial to the design of zeolite catalyst with desirable acid site

Interfacial systems are ubiquitous and important to myriad processes of interest such as protein-protein interactions and catalysis of reactions. Investigating interfacial systems at the molecular level presents unique challenges to both experiments and molecular simulations. The challenges in molecular simulations of interfacial systems range from scalability of quantum simulations to transferability

Biologically derived materials have numerous applications in biomedical fields and beyond. Yet, the properties of these materials are difficult to alter because the natural biosynthetic mechanisms are difficult to elucidate, imitate, or adjust. Thus, many bio-derived materials are isolated from natural tissues, or substitutes are recombinantly produced and then modified ex vivo. A major shift in this

The contact angle between a solid surface and the interface between two coexisting fluids, which characterizes the relative preference of the surface for one fluid over another, plays an important role in many areas of science and technology. In recent years, significant progress has been made in both our understanding of contact angles estimated using molecular simulations, and our ability to perform

Surface active compounds are continually designed and formulated to advance a large number of modern applications. In the past, the key design principle was the amount of surfactants adsorbed on a surface, because most attention was on changing the substrate wettability. As technology progresses, this is no longer sufficient, and the community is interested in preparing uniform surfactant films on

Woody biomass is complex molecularly. It has long been used successfully as a chemical feedstock without understanding its components and their pyrolysis behavior at a molecular level, but such an understanding would bring new flexibility and control to processing design and operation. Recent data and modeling have in combination made much of cellulose pyrolysis quantitatively predictable. Hemicellulose

Development of novel approaches for designing advanced energy storage devices generally requires a fundamental understanding of the atomic structure of and processes in constituent materials. Correspondingly, the modern-day frameworks for computational design of electrolyte materials extensively employ either quantum calculations or atomistic simulation methods, or often, a combination thereof. Within

The multiscale design of soft materials requires an ensemble of computational techniques spanning quantum-chemistry to molecular dynamics to continuum modeling. The recent emergence of machine-learning (ML) and modern optimization algorithms has accelerated material property prediction, as well as stimulated the development of hybrid ML/molecular modeling methodologies capable of providing physical

Since its commercialization in the late 1980s and the concurrent emergence of the field of tissue engineering, bacterial cellulose (BC) has attracted growing attention as a tissue engineering scaffold. It is commonly accepted that tissue scaffolds for implantation into the human body should be biocompatible, that is, non-toxic and non-immunogenic, biodegradable, and biomimetic, that is, mimic the tissue