(77d) Chemical Reaction Engineering and Industry: A Match Made in Heaven for Creating a Sustainable Society

Chemical reaction engineering as a discipline started in the early 1950s under the impulse of researchers at Shell Amsterdam R&D and the university of Delft. Although originally applied to the petroleum and petrochemical industries, its general methodology combining reaction chemistry and chemical engineering concepts allows optimization of a variety of systems where modeling or engineering of reactions is needed. The power of this approach will be illustrated on several applications such as electrification of olefin production, CO2 utilization in the steel industry and automated drug discovery. In each of these examples, interactions of flow phenomena, mass transfer, heat transfer, and reaction kinetics are of prime importance in order to relate reactor performance to feed composition and operating conditions. Understanding chemical reactions and optimizing conditions has resulted in a series of new, patented reactor designs, which are essential in the context of sustainability and increasing profit margins. Supported by new tools such as AI reaction engineering is moving faster than ever before. Thanks to our engineering approaches that are tailored for the development of new processes and the improvement of existing technologies reaction engineering is now applied in the whole process industry.