Property Estimation and Modeling for Product Design

To be commercially successful, chemical products must be designed to possess a wide range of physical properties. These properties range from performance properties such as the solvency of solvents, the enthalpy of vaporization of refrigerants and the rheology of foods to safety and environmental properties such as the flash points of adhesives, the biodegradability of antifreeze and the aquatic toxicity of detergents. Determining these properties for the large number of candidates typically examined during a product design is a challenging problem. Because experimental determination is expensive and time consuming and thus seldom justified at an early development stage, physical property estimation techniques are commonly used to evaluate and screen proposed products. We welcome presentations on the use of physical property estimation techniques in the field of chemical product design. While all relevant papers are welcome we are particularly interested in discussions on the estimation and correlation of properties for products containing complex mixtures, complex molecules or multiple phases. The emphasis should be on novel methods or novel applications of existing methods for predicting (even with low accuracy) product behavior.