*Editorial* **Special Issue on "Chemical Process Design, Simulation and Optimization"**

**Jean-Pierre Corriou 1,\* and Jean-Claude Assaf 2,3,4,\***


Received: 30 November 2020; Accepted: 2 December 2020; Published: 4 December 2020

Since humanity has been able to transform materials, such as raw minerals, and produce food or beverages, a central question was the type of operation and how and where it should be performed. Thus, furnaces, ovens and simple distillation stills were operated, to cite a few. Thermodynamics already started as a new science with the development of vapor engines, from Denis Papin in the seventeenth century to James Watt in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century saw the huge development of industries devoted to large productions and the arrival of electricity. New methods started to be available to engineers for the design of workshops in factories. However, chemical engineering started as a real science with the concept of unit operations first taught by G. Davis at the University of Manchester in 1887 and quickly spread to MIT. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of the petroleum industry and the building of refineries strengthened the need for new and more efficient calculation procedures; thus, new concepts were invented. Transport phenomena, heat and mass transfer and chemical reaction engineering became new fields of research and found important applications. After the Second World War, the arrival of computers modified the landscape for engineers as, for the first time, it allowed them to perform extremely complex calculations and no frontiers seemed impossible to reach. First, custom computing codes were developed, then commercial codes, often created in research labs before industrial development, were largely available to design engineers for their simulation needs. Simultaneously, it seemed that chemical engineering was too restrictive and its methods could be applied in other domains, such as metallurgy and biotechnology, hence the broader denomination of chemical process engineering. Batch as well as continuous processes are considered, and dynamic simulation as well as steady-state simulation is a usual practice. Furthermore, with more and more powerful computers, it was possible to aggregate the optimization with respect to parameters and even unit operations together with the design. Nowadays, even process control seems possible at early stages of the design. It is also usual to use dedicated codes of computational fluid dynamics integrating heat transfer and possibly chemical reactions, in industries as well as in research departments.

In this context, it is natural that this Special Issue of "Chemical Process Design, Simulation and Optimization" was likely to attract a large number of proposals for authors of many different countries. It must be underlined that these proposals are very different from what they would have been forty or twenty years before with the availability of computing codes.
