Innovation is key in addressing the above challenges in a manner which establishes and maintains competitive advantage. Unsurprisingly, the industry is investigating a host of new ideas in diverse areas such as the design of new types of processing equipment for reaction and separation, the exploration of new chemistry for the production of old and new chemicals, the utilisation of new catalysts, the reconsideration of old chemistry which had been tried and abandoned in the past, and radical changes in operating procedures in processes which, because of either regulation or plain conservatism, had been left untouched for decades. Moreover, there have been major changes in the scale of the processes being designed, both upwards (e.g. towards “world scale” plants for basic chemicals such as ethylene and methanol) and downwards (as is the case for new energy-related technologies and devices such as fuel cells).
By its very nature, innovation involves making decisions in the absence of complete information, and this inevitably leads to risks – both technological and commercial. In this paper, we argue that a major role of process modelling is to manage technological risk in innovation. We provide an overview of some of the key developments in process modelling in the recent past and how they relate to model-based innovation. We focus on four aspects: the increasing detail in modelling complex processes which are distributed with respect to several spatial and other dimensions; the increasingly tighter links between modelling and experimentation; model-based techniques for process scale-up; and the use of modelling for the quantification of technological risk.