Editorial: Fundamentals, design and applications in process-intensifying equipment

Abstract

Process intensification in chemical engineering processes has been a topic of significant scientific interest for well over 20 years and its interest in the process industries for diverse applications is prevailing. A wide variety of process-intensifying equipment has been developed over this time and are currently used in industrial applications. This Research Topic focuses on the use of specific equipment for process intensification. It aims covering recent and novel research on processintensifying equipment, ranging from the fundamental physical understanding of process improvement, performance characterization and design guidelines for such devices to applications of industrial interest. Mixing is a cornerstone of process intensification. Often “intensified” reactors and heat exchange devices are simply novel and more effective methods of mixing. Hence, the measurement of mixing is a key underpinning technique in PI research. A variety of methods for in situmeasurements of mixing have been developed, as different techniques are required for different circumstances, due to variations in the phases present, viscosities, opacities etc. In PI. Frey et al.’s paper, “A Novel Approach for Visualizing Mixing Phenomena of Reactive Liquid-Liquid Flows in Milliand Micro-Channels”, the authors describe a new way of measuring small-scale flows, using spatially resolved imaging UV/Vis spectroscopy. The paper, (Matos et al.) “Mixing in the NETmix Reactor” illustrates the uses of simulation in design of intensified process technologies. It describes the modelling of a multiple chamber jet-impingement reactor, allowing optimisation of its geometric parameters. One of the main forms of process intensification in practise is the conversion of inherently inefficient batch processes to more efficient continuous processing. A key element in this conversion is the presence or availability of the necessary analytical OPEN ACCESS