Chemical product design: challenges and opportunities

This paper highlights for a class of chemical products, the design process, their design with respect to the important issues, the need for appropriate tools and finally, lists some of the challenges and opportunities for the process systems engineering (PSE)/computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) community. The chemical products considered belong to the following types: chemical/biochemical/agrochemical products, coatings and solvents, food (nutraceuticals), HI&I (household, industrial and institutional), personal care, pharmaceuticals and drugs. The challenges and opportunities are highlighted in terms of the needs for multi-level modeling with emphasis on property models that are suitable for computer-aided applications, flexible solution strategies that are able to solve a large range of chemical product design problems