Industrial Catalysis and Process Engineering

Industrial Catalysis:

Catalysts are substances that speed up reactions by presenting an alternative pathway for the breaking and building of bonds. The solution to this alternative pathway is lower activation energy than that needed for the uncatalyzed reaction.

Much fundamental and applied research is affected by industrial companies and university research laboratories to find out how catalysts work and to develop their effectiveness. If the catalytic activity can be updated, it may be tolerable to lower the temperature and/or the pressure at which the process works and thus save fuel which is one of the significant costs in a large-scale chemical process. Further, it may be possible to lessen the number of reactants that are consumed forming undesired by-products.

Process Engineering:

Process engineering is the perception and application of the basic principles and laws of nature that enable us to transform raw material and energy into products that are useful to society, at an industrial level. By taking advantage of the driving forces of nature such as pressure, temperature, and concentration gradients, as well as the law of preservation of mass, process engineers can develop methods to integrate and purify large volumes of desired chemical products. Process engineering concentrates on the design, operation, control, optimization and intensification of chemical, physical, and biological processes. Process engineering includes a broad range of industries, such as agriculture, automotive, biotechnical, chemical, food, material development, mining, nuclear, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and software development. The application of systematic computer-based systems to process engineering is a process systems engineering.