Perspective on multiscale methodology for product design and engineering

In order both to meet today's economic demands and to remain competitive in global trade, the chemical and related industries have to satisfy the market requirements for high-volume low-price bulk intermediate chemicals or for specific nano- and micro-scale end-use properties of low-volume high-price speciality functional chemical products, as well as the social and environmental constraints of industrial meso- and macroscale production processes. This requires chemical engineering to follow a scientific approach that includes a multidisciplinary and multiscale time and length integrated approach to the complex simultaneous and, often, coupled transfer phenomena and molecular processes that occur on different scales of the chemical supply chain. That is, a good understanding of how phenomena at a smaller length scale relates to properties and behaviour at a longer length scale is necessary (from the molecular scaleup to the scale of the entire production site and commercialization). This has been defined as the triplet “molecular Processes-Product-Process Engineering (3PE)” integrated multiscale approach of chemical engineering for chemical product design and manufacturing. This paper presents the perspective on this multiscale methodology, on its success due to the today's considerable progress in the use of scientific instrumentation, in modeling, simulation and computer-aided tools, and in the systematic design methods.