Extending the knowledge base of chemical engineering

The obvious current reversion to micro-scale investigations in basic chemical engineering, combined with the need, of a quite different nature, in the rapid growth of high added-value and small-lot functional materials, have been pointing to an area not yet sufficiently covered by the unit operations, transport phenomena and chemical reaction engineering. Although it is difficult to define accurately this area, a cursory scan of the activities already in progress has revealed a few common attributes: multi-phased (structured), multi-scaled, multi-disciplined, nonlinear, needs for resolution to reductionism-solvable subsystems, and pervasive in the process industry. From these activities, the present paper drafts a tentative scheme for studying the related problems: first to dissect a problem into various scales ? spatial, temporal or otherwise as best suits the case in hand ? in order to identify pertinent parameters which are then organized into model formulations. Together with inter-scale model formulations, a zoom-in/zoom-out process is carried out between the scales, by trial-and-error and through reasoning, to arrive at a global formulation of a quantitative solution, in order to derive, eventually, the general from the particular.