Chemicals Industry Reaction Engineering Roadmap Summary
An electronic copy of the roadmap can be downloaded (PDF 3.3 MB) Download Adobe Reader.
Background
The Reaction Engineering Roadmap, held in conjunction with the 1999 Annual American Institute of Chemical Engineer's meeting in Dallas, Texas on October 30-31, 1999, brought together forty experts from the chemical industry, its customer industries, universities, and government research laboratories to brainstorm on technology development needs for reaction engineering. The results from the workshop were published by Center for Waste Reduction Technology (CWRT) in the Vision2020: Reaction Engineering Roadmap.
Vision Linkage
The workshop was held to develop a path to overcome the barriers and challenges identified in the Process Science and New Technologies section of Technology Vision 2020: The Chemical Industry to allow the industry to maintain its competitive position into the next millennium. The technology development needs identified in the roadmap cover reactor design and scale-up, chemical mechanisms, catalysts, and new reactor development. Addressing these research needs should result in optimized, integrated reactor systems with higher selectivity, yield, and purity. They should use less energy, generate less waste, operated at extreme conditions, produce new products, and bring these products to market faster.
Goal
- 30% reduction in material usage, energy usage, water consumption, toxic dispersion, and pollutant dispersion [as measured by relative indicators developed by the National Roundtable for the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) and subsequently refined by CWRT].
Priority R&D Needs
- Basic Chemicals - Obtain and predict physical, chemical, and transport property data and experimentally verify model results
- Specialty Chemicals - Develop models to predict product properties a priori, to facilitate reactor/process design, and to increase reaction selectivity
- Pharmaceuticals - Develop better experimental screening techniques to reduce development time and costs, combinatorial techniques to evaluate synthesis, thermo-chemical and thermo-physical properties data for complex systems, and better catalysts plus improved reactor design for high purity/selectivity/yield
- Polymers - Develop better experimental screening techniques, advanced property prediction capabilities, the ability to link process conditions to product properties (at the micro-, meso-, and macro-scales), and polymers that can be disassembled (unzipped) for recycle
- Reactor System Design and Scale-up - Obtain physical, chemical, and transport property data for input into and verification of models; develop robust models for reactor design and synthesis development
- Chemical Mechanisms - Develop micro-kinetic experimental capabilities, methods to integrate solvent effects into reaction models, tools to couple process chemistry and process modeling, and methods to determine macroscopic properties from molecular structures
- Catalysis - Develop better in-situ characterization and synthesis methods, system integration techniques to optimize catalyst and reactor operations simultaneously, catalysts for solid matrices, and fuel-cell related catalysts
- Novel Reactors - Focus research on reactors with intensified transport capabilities (e.g., rapid heating and cooling, and structured contacting), external-field assisted and photochemical reactions, reactors for extreme conditions; and developing enabling technologies that include new materials, systems integration, micro-properties and phenomena determination, multi-stage design capabilities, and self-assembling reactor development
- Cross-Cutting Research - Develop improved experimental tools and sensors to provide the data for models and system integration, improved models to effectively design new reactors and make major chemistry changes, and system integration to accomplish objectives in a cost effective, timely manner