New Directions for Chemical Engineering (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 141-164
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From page 141... ...
In fact, the overall probability that a drug entering clinical trials will be approved by the FDA is about 12 percent (DiMasi et al., 2016)
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Both development and validation of these systems are research areas that chemical engineers are well suited to address.
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. Today in the era of COVID-19, chemical engineers, especially those collaborating with other scientists and engineers in environmental sciences and technology, have opportunities to contribute to societal health and well-being and help narrow the disparities between low- and middle income countries and higher-income countries.
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From page 144... ...
Hand sanitizers and related consumer/cleanser products are another aspect of hygiene that has risen to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and an area in which chemical engineering has an important role to play, especially with respect to the balance
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. Although many health disparities result from systemic issues that can be addressed only through larger social changes, chemical engineers can still play a role in helping to resolve these issues.
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Essential ethical considerations include the impact of new technologies or processes on low-resource communities and marginalized populations who experience greater health disparities, including how new treatments or technologies will be received among different cultures and populations and the impact on the environment. Chemical engineers have an opportunity to help reduce health disparities when they explicitly incorporate human-centered design into technologies to make them more accessible, equitable, and culturally sensitive.
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From page 147... ...
. In addition, supply chain issues, such as quality and consistency of raw material, become even more important with a perfusion approach to minimize product variance.
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Current challenges for applications in health and medicine include advancing personalized medicine and the engineering of biological molecules, including proteins, nucleic acids, and other entities such as viruses and cells; bridging the interface between materials and devices and health; improving the use of tools from systems and synthetic biology to understand biological networks and the intersections with data science and machine learning; developing the next steps in manufacturing; and using engineering approaches to address equity and access to health care. All of these challenges present opportunities for chemical engineers to apply systems-level approaches and their ability to work across
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Furthermore, increased diversity of both students and instructors in the classroom will provide a broader perspective on the challenges requiring engineering solutions. Recommendation 5-1: Federal research investments in biomolecular engineering should be directed to fundamental research to advance personalized medicine and the engineering of biological mole cules, including proteins, nucleic acids, and other entities such as viruses and cells; bridge the interface between materials and devices and health; improve the use of tools from systems and synthetic biology to under stand biological networks and the intersections with data science and computational approaches; and develop engineering approaches to reduce costs and improve equity and access to health care.
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150 New Directions for Chemical Engineering Recommendation 5-2: Researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations to develop pilot- and demonstration-scale projects in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing processes.
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Chemical engineers play a critical role in manufacturing and can thus contribute to more sustainable manufacturing through efficiency, nimbleness, and process in tensification. The principles of green chemistry and green engineering will be important in the shift from molecular to larger system scales, and to more sustainable manufactur ing and a circular economy.
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. More recently, consideration of environmental and social justice has become increasingly important for chemical engineers in these analyses.
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Design for Energy Efficiency -- energy requirements of chemical processes should be recog nized for their environmental and economic impacts and should be minimized. If possible, syn thetic methods should be conducted at ambient temperature and pressure.
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Some of these concepts are likely to play major roles in the deployment of manufacturing to low- and middle-income countries and to economically depressed regions of higher-income countries, as well as in various efforts at reshoring of manufacturing through new technologies. Indeed, industrial manufacturing has the potential in this century to at least partially transform physically from the scale of the petrochemical complexes studied by today's undergraduate chemical engineers to more heterogeneous intensified and distributed manufacturing sites, including those with electrically driven power sources.
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Transitioning manufacturing from a linear to a circular economy is a key opportunity for chemical engineers. FEEDSTOCK FLEXIBILITY FOR MANUFACTURING OF EXISTING AND ADVANTAGED PRODUCTS The chemical engineering profession emerged in large part to confront the urgent challenges faced more than a century ago in the then-burgeoning petroleum refining industry.
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From page 156... ...
For example, the availability of stranded natural gas resources, along with the potential harm of leakage of GHGs from those resources, makes conversion of these streams via chemical, biological, electrochemical, or other means a key opportunity for chemical engineers. The use of nonthermal approaches requiring minimal utility infrastructure may be critical for the ultimate feasibility of small-scale and distributed harnessing of such feedstocks as stranded natural gas; industrial waste gases; and industrial, commercial, or municipal wastewater (Khalilpour and Karimi, 2012; Tuck et al., 2012)
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From page 157... ...
The latter includes such conversion approaches as hydrothermal liquefaction, pyrolysis, and gasification. While TEA and LCA, along with the demonstrable technical feasibility of a given process, will ultimately and quantitatively inform how various processes are adopted, scaled, and enabled, many opportunities exist to define new flowsheets using emerging tools in electrochemistry, photochemistry, synthetic biology, integrated separations and catalysis, and many other tools that are familiar to chemical engineers.
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New separation technologies will be critical to realizing these transformations, as will catalysts that can enable the necessary reductive chemistry while remaining stable in aqueous environments. Beyond innovative process and chemistry developments, there are fundamental research problems for chemical engineers to solve in the feedstock flexibility arena.
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. Another example of PI in manufacturing of electronic materials is the use of external accel eration to eliminate the limitation of the gravity driving force in phase separation.
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160 New Directions for Chemical Engineering Four principles for PI design have guided thinking about how chemical processes are developed (Harmsen, 2007; Tian et al., 2018) : Maximize the effectiveness of intra- and intermolecular events.
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Because much work in additive manufacturing is taking place in the mechanical engineering and materials science communities, chemical engineers have numerous opportunities to combine expertise from these adjacent fields with application-specific needs in chemical processing.
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Opportunities for chemical engineers in AM broadly include supporting advances for faster printing with higher resolution, as well as use of multiple or more advanced and sustainable materials with attention to end of life. These efforts are best undertaken in partnership with mechanical and software engineers, collaboratively improving the technologies that scale these processes for widespread use.
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The circular economy uses waste streams as sources of secondary resources, and it incorporates the principles of green chemistry and engineering (Box 6-1; Anastas and Warner, 1998; Anastas and Zimmerman, 2003; Collias et al., 2021)
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Strategy 2: Extend useful life -- Design for durability, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling to keep materials, products, and packaging circulating in the economy as long as possible, thus preserving energy and materials. Strategy 3: Regenerate natural systems -- There is synergy between a circular economy and a biobased economy.
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