(38b) Unifying Principles of Product Design

Our mission is to address grand challenges in particle science and technology. These are related to the formation, processing and application of particulate systems along the five dimensions of size, shape, surface, structure and composition. Today, unit operations and product design are the two most important pillars of chemical engineering. Product design is the formation, formulation, handling, manufacturing, and characterization of complex multiphase products with specific properties. The applications define the required product properties which cover both classical fields of process technology in the chemical industry as well as new emerging fields of electronics, energy and environmental technologies, life sciences, materials science and engineering, nanotechnology, and photonic technologies highlighting the broad relevance of mesoscale science. The following five unifying principles of particulate product design are proposed which are widely applicable to many different kinds of products including solid, liquid, and even gaseous particles: i) Particle formation by top-down and bottom-up approaches, ii) interactions between the building blocks, iii) structure formation by self-organization and by transport processes, iv) characterization along the process chain, v) multiscale modelling and simulation. Results from the Erlangen Cluster of Excellence “Engineering of Advanced Materials” show that the joint venture of chemical engineering with materials science in concert with the basic sciences opens new prospects for all involved disciplines. In particular, chemical and biochemical engineering expands through particle technologies also in physics related fields of technology such as electronics, photonics, or 3D printing. Rigorous mathematical optimization methods based on predictive models for structure-property and process-structure functions are the key for the design of products, structures, and processes and will catalyze new possibilities for true design of particulate products.

References:

Peukert W., Segets D., Pflug L., Leugering G., Unifying principles of product design, Advances in Chemical Engineering 46 (2015), 1-81.