Imperial professor ‘honoured’ to have given Danckwerts Lecture on molecular systems engineering in Lisbon

ECCE

ICHEME Fellow and Imperial College London professor Claire Adjiman delivered the prestigious Danckwerts Lecture at the 15th European Congress of Chemical Engineering (ECCE) in Lisbon, Portugal, describing the experience as an “honour”.

Adjiman spoke on day two of the three-day conference, presenting her research in molecular systems engineering for process and product design.

Adjiman describes her work as “extending the boundary of process design to include molecular or material level decisions”. Her talk in Lisbon highlighted her group’s adoption of computational modelling to help design chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes at the molecular level – aiming to make them more sustainable.

Adjiman said: “It was such an honour to present the work of my group and collaborators during the Danckwerts lecture and to discuss how physics-based models can help to design more sustainable products and processes.”

Conventional process design often begins with molecular and material selection for the solvents and catalysts used for individual reactions. Adjiman warns that optimising individual reaction steps can lead to “unintended consequences” for the overall process – such as “solvent swapping” when optimal conditions differ between steps. Instead, she suggests it may be more efficient to identify materials that can work across multiple stages. However, evaluating the vast number of potential molecular structures remains a highly time-consuming challenge.

To overcome this, Adjiman’s group has focused on using computational modelling, which she says is at the “core” of her research. In an interview with the ECCE organisers, she said: “Models allow us to explore designs well beyond what can reasonably be tested experimentally. They remove barriers such as lack of material, safety concerns or lack and cost of large equipment.”

Adjiman also highlighted the frequent choice of water as a “green solvent” as an example of suboptimal material selection, noting that many substances don’t dissolve in it, temperature and phase changes require significant energy and decontaminating water before disposal is costly. “All of these considerations can have a negative impact on overall sustainability,” she said.

She also stressed the critical role of experiments, saying “they are used to generate the data needed to parameterise and validate our models…increasingly, they are used alongside models to provide information that cannot yet be predicted”.

The Danckwerts Lecture was established in 1985 in memory of former Chemical Engineering Science editor and past IChemE president Peter Danckwerts. Hosting duties for the talk alternate each year between the biennial ECCE and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ annual meeting. 

In addition to other plenary speeches, the ECCE took abstract and paper submissions across a number of topics, including AI, education, circular economy, health, food processing, net zero and applied biotechnology.

This year’s ECCE took place alongside the eighth European Congress of Applied Biotechnology and the third Iberoamerican Congress on Chemical Engineering. The three conferences were organised by the European Federation of Chemical Engineering, German chemical engineering body DECHEMA, the European Society of Biochemical Engineering Sciences, the Portuguese Society of Biotechnology, and Portuguese engineering body Ordem dos Engenheiros.