Hoogewerff Lezing 2013

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher

De Hoogewerff Lezing 2013 werd dit jaar gegeven door Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher als slotlezing tijdens het 9e European Congress of Chemical Engineering (ECCE9) op donderdag 25 april 2013. Dit congres, dat dit jaar het thema ‘Shaping a Sustainable Future!’ had, vond van 21 tot 25 april plaats in Den Haag. De titel van zijn lezing is: Molecular Structures, Matter Elements, Thermodynamic Routes, Process Networks: Some Elements of the Future Toolbox for Chemical Process Design.

Prof. Dr.-Ing Kai Sundmacher is Director and Scientific Member of MPI Magdeburg, Full Professor for Process Systems Engineering at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.

Summary of the Lecture
In the last 50 years, Chemical Engineering has developed the “unit operations” concept and has applied it successfully to the design of many chemical production processes. Since the 1980s, new ideas for further process improvements have been created which are summarized under the term “process intensification”. But, for being able to contribute to the solution of the upcoming extremely challenging problems that our society is awaiting in the coming decades, the discipline Chemical Engineering has to establish a new conceptual framework and new toolboxes containing powerful “screw drivers” for designing highly efficient and sustainable breakthrough technologies. Instead of building processes from existing libraries of materials and devices, chemical engineers have to solve the design task as a multiscale decision procedure, under consideration of all degrees of freedom available at the different process levels.