INTRODUCTION In the preceding years to the terrorist attacks in the United States of September 11th, 2001, the chemical industry focused its process safety activities on accidental release risks. Rarely, if ever, was consideration given to the risk of intentional release, or beyond that, the differences in the nature of such a release. This was most likely due to a perception that these risks w...

Biotransformations are structural modifications in a chemical compound by organisms /enzyme systems that lead to the formation of molecules with relatively greater polarity [1,2]. This mechanism has been developed by microbes to acclimatize to environmental changes and it is useful in a wide range of biotechnological processes [3]. The most significant aspect of biotransformation is that it mai...

This paper discusses approaches for providing chemical engineering students a contemporary experience in product and process design. Current trends and issues in chemical engineering education are reviewed, as well as the interaction between business decision-making and product and process design. Then, the Stage-Gate product development process is examined as utilized by product and process en...

Given its practical importance in industrial applications, automatic generation of inference systems is an important area of research. LFC is a new algorithm developed to generate a compact set of fuzzy classification rules from data. The premise is extracted directly using a global optimization procedure based on a new recently introduced paradigm called artificial chemical process. The conclu...

Documenting the rationale in design processes is commonly accepted to be rewarding, but rarely done in practice due to the required time and effort. We propose an integrated approach to work process and decision modeling, characterized by both an improved usefulness of the models and less effort for their creation.

Process philosophy’—based on contributions of Alfred North Whitehead (1867-1947)—has resources that would be useful in philosophy of chemistry. This approach would particularly appropriate for dealing with questions involving time-dependent self-organization in far-from-equilibrium open systems. Such spontaneous generation of coherent dynamic structure is of central importance in many fields (i...

Various interrelated issues that effect the reliability and efficiency of Newton-like methods for chemical process optimization are studied. An algorithm for solving large, sparse quadratic programming (QP) problems that is based on an active set strategy and a symmetric, indefinite factorization is presented. The QP algorithm is fast and reliable. A simple asymmetric trust region method is pro...

Advancements in sensors and database technologies have resulted in the collection of huge amounts of process data from chemical plants. A number of process quantities such as temperature, pressure, flow rates, level, composition, and pH can be easily measured. Chemical processes are dynamic systems and are equipped with hundreds or thousands of sensors that generate readings at regular interval...

We are investigating hypotheses pertaining to the origin of life. There are several challenges inherent in this modeling task. These include soliciting sufficiently well structured hypotheses from biologists, managing heterogeneous background knowledge, dealing with vast numbers of possible interacting entities, and providing investigators with cues for hypothesis revision. To address the first...