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Product design and engineering — past, present,
future trends in teaching, research and practices:
academic and industry points of view
Jens Uhlemann1, Raquel Costa2 and Jean-Claude Charpentier3
Product Design & Engineering (PDE) aims to define new and/or
improved products based on customer needs and/or new
technologies.
A comprehensive discussion of PDE as a building block for
chemical engineering education, research and practice seems
still lacking, preventing a broader impact on academic and
industry realities more and more concerned with the
‘knowledge economy’.
The purpose of the present current opinion paper was to
contribute to the mitigation of this gap by presenting the results
the EFCE Section Group PDE survey based on PDE academia
and industry expert and practitioner feedback as well as on a
literature review. The paper discusses PDE status and
challenges as well as maps academic and industry
requirements, unmet needs and perspectives for the product
manufacturing in the framework of Industry 4.0.
Addresses
1
Head of Environmental Science Formulation Technology, Bayer AG,
Crop Science Division, D-40789 Monheim, Germany
2
CIEPQPF – Chemical Engineering Processes and Forest Products
Research Center, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of
Coimbra, Rua Silvio Lima, 3030-790 Coimbra, Portugal
3
Laboratoire Réactions et Génie des Procédés, CNRS – ENSIC,
Université de Lorraine, 1, rue Grandville, 54000 Nancy, France
Corresponding author: Uhlemann, Jens (jens.uhlemann@bayer.com)
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2019, 27:10–21
This review comes from a themed issue on Frontiers of chemical
engineering
Edited by Rafiqul Gani
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coche.2019.10.003
2211-3398/ã 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an
open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Introduction: product design and engineering
as a building block to help the transition of
chemical engineering towards the ‘knowledge
economy’ adapted to targeted product
production
The field of Product Design & Engineering (PDE),
sometimes heralded as one of the paradigms of chemical
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2020, 27:10–21
engineering beyond the traditional pillars of unit opera-
tions and transport phenomena, is concerned with the
definition of new and/or improved products based on the
inputs of customer needs and/or the contribution of new
technologies. PDE may be considered as the chemical
engineering contribution to the new product develop-
ment (NPD) workflows in the process industries, leverag-
ing and exploiting the chemical engineering body of
knowledge, which is today concerned with the optimal
transformation of raw materials and energy into targeted
products, with no polluting waste.
PDE leads to new and/or improved products and simul-
taneously to new manufacturing concepts that result from
its chemical engineering heritage. It is the beauty of the
PDE concept that industrialization and manufacturing
are explicitly addressed; the discovery does not stop at the
lab or bench scale.
The process industries, for example, the life sciences,
material, food and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG)
sectors, employ process manufacturing as distinctly dif-
ferent from discrete manufacturing. The systematic
design and engineering of new products is more
advanced and established in discrete manufacturing
industries which create identical items built in assembly
lines [1–4].
It is the authors’ view, sustained by their experience
both in industry and academia, that a comprehensive
discussion of PDE as one of the building blocks of
chemical engineering education, research and practice
seems still today lacking, which prevents the PDE
discipline from having broader impact on academia
teaching and research and the reality of process indus-
tries. The purpose of the present article is to contribute
to the mitigation of this gap between academia educa-
tion and industry practices, providing an overview of the
history (25+ years) and the current status of PDE as well
as outlining key areas for further development of the
discipline for the benefit of academia and industry
partnerships. To quote Charpentier [5], “It used to
be industry, now the customer is king. Adapting the
engineering approach for tomorrow’s chemistry: Process
Engineering and Product Engineering.”.
Four distinct drivers can be identified fueling the devel-
opment of PDE in the dimensions people/activity and
industry/academia (Figure 1):
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Past, present and future of product design engineering from industry and academia perspective Uhlemann, Costa and Charpentier 11

Figure 1

Academia Industry

Teaching Training
People New chemical engineering job Globalization
profiles Cross functional teams
Multidisciplinary Life-long learning
Soft skills
Performance Materials

Drivers
Activity

Research Innovation / NPD

Multi-scale modelling Market differentiation
Structured products Enabling technologies
Integration with material science Life cycle management, branding
New manufacturing paradigms Complex supply chains

Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering

Key PDE drivers - four perspectives.

 Industry needs tools for managing complex supply
chains, market differentiation, life cycle management,
branding as well as enabling technologies.
 This, in turn, means that collaborators need to cope
with complex roles in globalized and cross functional
teams which means for them life-long learning with
continuing education.
 Academia teaches students for new chemical engineer-
ing job profiles that are more and more multidisciplin-
ary and require a sound understanding of soft skills and
performance materials.
 Academic research is driven by new opportunities
resulting from multi scale modelling, an increasing
integration with material science and engineering as
well as new needs related to structured products and
new manufacturing paradigms.
PDE has gone a long way since its inception in the late
80’s/early 90’s towards a more unified view, incorporating
three fundamental aspects ([6], Figure 2a):
(i) the chemical product pyramid
(ii) a multi-faceted multi scale approach (nano, micro,
meso, macro, and mega scales) and
(iii) the product and process design integration
In order to support product design and engineering,
both experimental as well as modelling and simulation
approaches may be leveraged, see also Section ‘Required
multiscale chemical product design and process engineer-
ing modeling and simulation’ below on multiscale
modelling.
But while PDE has grown steadily as a popular topic,
some scepticism emerged in recent assessments of the
discipline. To quote Gani and Ng [7], “despite the early
enthusiasm and substantial effort, there is a general
feeling in the chemical engineering community at this
time that research activities on chemical product design
have been flagging and that there is still no consensus on
what needs to be emphasized in teaching”.
Similarly, when discussing the role of universalities in
chemical engineering, Churchill stressed that “with many
of the most recent products the scale of manufacture is so
small that processing costs are less important than preci-
sion, reliability, and flexibility” and therefore “associated
changes in the curriculum are obviously necessary”. He
then added that while PDE “has been proposed to fulfil
this need” and “it has great potential as a generalization”,
“the commonalities have not yet received widespread
identification and/or acceptance” [8].

And by aligning chemical engineering with other scien- So, the ultimate goal of this article is to contribute to the
tific disciplines (Figure 2b) such as: establishment of PDE as a chemical engineering univer-
sality helping with the transition of chemical engineering
 materials science & engineering towards the ‘knowledge economy’ [9], in which growth is
 formulation science & technology and dependent on the quantity, quality and accessibility
 management science rather than chiefly on the means of production.

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12 Frontiers of chemical engineering

Figure 2

(a)

Product Design & Engineering

Chemical product
Customer needs Chemical product
and process
pyramid
integration Chemical product

New
technologies

Multi-faceted
approach

(b)
Formulation Science & Technology
Colloid chemistry
Interfacial physics

Management Science Chemical Engineering

Decision Theory Body of knowledge
Project Management
Innovation

Material Science & Engineering

Product Pyramid
Tetrahedron

Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering

(a) Fundamental PDE concepts. (b) Scientific disciplines contributing to the PDE core.

PDE on EFCE’s radar: a recent review and The literature review

survey project
The following discussion of the past, the present and
the way forward in PDE is supported by the results
of a survey project recently carried out by the
Section on Product Design and Engineering of
the European Federation of Chemical Engineering
(EFCE) [10–12].
This project was fully aligned with the EFCE mission,
namely in what regards to serving the European chemical
engineering community, supporting the education and
training of Chemical Engineers, influencing policymakers
on relevant matters, fostering academia/industry links,
and promoting collaborations for the advancement of
science and technology.
The literature review component served as a basis for the
retrospective assessment of PDE evolution [12]. It focused
on the systematic analysis of published books and a total of
146 fundamental PDE papers that address more traditional
chemical engineering concepts (unit operations, thermody-
namic equilibria, transport phenomena) and PDE core ideas
as part of the large volume of literature relevant to PDE that
was published between the late 1960’s and late 2018.
Very high publication intensity and an increasingly uni-
fied PDE approach were detected in application-oriented
fields, for example, flavour encapsulation, inorganic nano-
technology and pharmaceutical particulates. Certain
branches of the process industries have their own dedi-
cated body of PDE knowledge, for example,

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Past, present and future of product design engineering from industry and academia perspective Uhlemann, Costa and Charpentier 13
pharmaceutical [13], oil industries [14] or food industries
[15]. Moreover, PDE is the topic of several dedicated
book publications [16,17,18–20,21] and relates to defi-
nitions of chemical product types [22]. More recently,
numerous articles have been published on conceptual
approaches for the PDE topic, see references [23–35] to
cite but a few.
When looking retrospectively at the PDE literature, it is
interesting to mention that Rumpf’s concept of ‘property
functions’ and ‘process functions’ [36] triggered a sus-
tained wave of papers on PDE particle and dispersion
technology applications. The approaches were increas-
ingly generalized from simple products to increasingly
complex products. Several decades later, the chemical
product pyramid [37] was developed as an extension
of Rumpf’s original concept. This chemical product
pyramid parallels the material science tetrahedron as a
central concept of material science and engineering (see
e.g. [38–42,43]) and the illustration of the “Material
Science and Engineering” block in Figure 2b, comprising
the facets of ‘structure’, ‘processing’, ‘performance’ and
‘properties’.
The survey study
Complementary to the literature review, the project’s
survey study (hereinafter referred to as the EFCE-
PDE survey) gathered input from 27 PDE experts and
practitioners from both academia and industry. Informa-
tion was collected through purposely designed survey
forms (with around 25 fields) and direct interaction with
the respondents.
The academic respondents were invited to comment on
PDE teaching and research, PDE incorporation into the
chemical engineering curriculum, PDE-related curriculum
changes, the PDE teaching challenges, the major strengths
and weaknesses of their graduates for process industry
NPD, and, finally, hot PDE-related research topics.
The survey form comprised four parts:
(a) affiliation, general information on teaching duties and
research interests
(b) current practice of teaching, for example, syllabus,
additional focused skills, key references and the
challenges
(c) research terminology (e.g. product or formulation
design or engineering), research categories (e.g. tools,
methods, approaches and concepts), open innovation
approaches and hot research topics
(d) other relevant thoughts
The industry respondents provided input on their
company’s NPD workflows, on unmet PDE needs both
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in terms of the workforce and the existing body of
knowledge. The survey form comprised five parts asking:
(a) affiliation
(b) current practice, e.g. details regarding the company’s
industrial sector and terminology (e.g. new product
development, formulation science and technology),
NPD workflow and systematic approaches, the use of
formal systematic tools (e.g. QFD, FMEA), innova-
tion strategies and product and process design
integration.
(c) unmet needs as related to the existing body of
knowledge, that is, limitations and challenges, areas
for development and benefits and achievements
(d) unmet needs as related to workforce and the NPD
integration of chemical engineers
(e) other relevant thoughts
Responses were sought from 16 universities with a track
record in PDE teaching, including institutions with a long
tradition in chemical engineering education, such as the
MIT where the world’s first four-year chemical engineer-
ing curriculum was created in 1888, as well as young
universities with chemical engineering programmes
established less than a decade ago (e.g. Universidad de
la Sabana, Colombia, created in 1979).
The industry respondents came from three medium (up
to 250 employees) and eight large renowned companies in
the process industry sector with activity in a range of areas
(food, household and personal care consumer products,
pharmaceuticals and biomedical products, agrochemicals,
electronic materials, processing equipment among
others). The participating companies have headquarters
in Europe or the US, in most cases with multinational
action, and recent annual revenues ranging from several
hundred millions to the tens of billion Euros. The indus-
try respondents held senior management positions and/or
senior technical roles.
The EFCE-PDE survey insight answers of the experts
and practitioners from both academia and industry are
summarized in Tables 1–3, and Figure 3a–d. They point
out and put in light the challenges in PDE teaching and
where there exist matching academic and industry
perspectives.
The challenges in PDE teaching
Though a great number of textbooks [16,17,18–20,21]
are now available and quite suitable, the main issues that
hinder the advances of teaching of PDE are challenges
listed and discussed in Table 1 (at least 45% mentions).
The general feeling in the chemical engineering community,
often discussed in the literature (e.g. [7]) and corroborated by
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2020, 27:10–21
14 Frontiers of chemical engineering

Table 1

Challenges in PDE teaching

 The need to combine chemical engineering with a less analytical perspective

 Lack of a widely accepted framework equivalent to that available for process design and engineering teaching

 Finding/developing examples to illustrate concepts and get students involved in product engineering calculations/analysis

 Generate appropriate open-ended product design projects

 Finding/developing chemical product-related examples to illustrate concepts in traditional core courses

 Insufficient coverage of chemical product-related science and technology in the chemical engineering core curriculum

 Teaching product design in addition to traditional process design

the EFCE-PDE survey, is that the limited presence of PDE
in chemical engineering programmes is due not so much to
the fact that the value of PDE is not appreciated, but the fact
that this tends to be a hard subject to teach. PDE is a very
interdisciplinary field, with a strong emphasis on a wide range
of science and technology topics, but also requiring the
involvement in the business sphere. The need to combine
chemical engineering with business skills and topics (e.g.
marketing and innovation management), commercial aware-
ness and a generally less analytical perspective is recurrently
described as one of the major challenges faced by those
involved in PDE. In general, chemical engineering
academics and students prefer easily quantifiable and ana-
lytical problems; after all, these are what attracted most of the
faculty, practitioners and students to the discipline. Dealing
with lower degree of definition, compared to that in tradi-
tional core disciplines and well-defined process design, tends
to make PDE more difficult to teach.
The lack of a framework for PDE, equivalent to that
available for process design teaching, to organize think-
ing, communicate ideas and teach concepts may be less of
a concern today than 15–10 years ago when the efforts to
systematize PDE became more evident. However, this is

Table 2

Curricular changes aligned with the incorporation of PDE in chemical engineering programmes in the universities considered in the
EFCE-PDE survey (respective response rates in the survey in brackets)

 Teaching stand-alone product design course (78%)

 Teaching product design as part of process design course (28%)

 Curriculum diversification to include more product-related science and technology (67%)

 Biotechnology
 Rheology
 Particle processing
 Electrochemical engineering
 Formulation technologies
 Materials sciences

  Incorporating product-related examples in traditional core courses (72%)

 Fluid mechanics
 Transport phenomena
 Thermodynamics
 Physical chemistry
 Organic chemistry
 Reaction engineering
 Unit operations
 Process dynamics and control
 Process design

 Increasing training in innovation management, marketing research, NPD and IP (50%)

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Past, present and future of product design engineering from industry and academia perspective Uhlemann, Costa and Charpentier 15

Table 3

EFCE-PDE survey insight into the top strengths and weaknesses of graduating chemical engineers and the major challenges faced by
newcomers when it comes to the non-commodity product sectors and new product development in particular

Top strengths
 Holistic view, systematic approach, systems thinking

 Traditional chemical engineering core

Top weaknesses
 Excessive (exclusive) focus on traditional chemical engineering core

 Science skills (industry likes science-savvy engineers!)

 Business skills (industry likes business-savvy engineers!)

 Formulation technologies

 Solids engineering

 Specific production engineering areas: safety, environmental protection aspects, digital technologies (industry 4.0 is out there!)

Major challenges faced by newcomers

 VUCA world, the speed of projects in the FMCG industry, increasingly complex products and project setups

 Creativity, fantasy, innovation

 End-to-end thinking and establish business cases

 Make the link between university education and industrial practice

still considered to be one of the challenges by those who
are involved in PDE teaching.
Finding real, or at least realistic, product design problems
is another common difficulty in PDE teaching, as
reported in Table 1. This is both because the details of
industrial innovations are usually undisclosed, and teach-
ing examples in chemical engineering have traditionally
been built around process design over decades whereas
PDE is a much more recent educational concern. Devel-
oping case studies for PDE courses to illustrate concepts
and tools as well as getting students involved in design
calculations is often challenging, and one of the top
difficulties referred in Table 1. Generating appropriate
statements for open-ended product design projects was
also described as a demanding job.
mechanics, transport phenomena) as part of an integrated
strategy to develop PDE teaching has also been flagged in
Table 1.
At a broader, curricular level, the frequently insufficient
coverage of product-related science and technology in
more traditional chemical engineering programmes, and
the need to accommodate in the curricula process design
and product design, both fairly demanding topics requir-
ing complementary but distinct approaches, are also
factors generally complicating effective PDE teaching.
The EFCE-PDE survey emphasized that a common
feeling among faculty involved in PDE is that many
colleagues regard product design as part of process design,
while different perspectives and toolboxes are required to
tackle the two problems.

The design problems tackled by the students must be
complex enough for the students to exercise decision-
making, but without complexity being a factor interfering
with the learning of basic product design methods. Devel-
oping case studies and design project statements for PDE
is hard and uncomfortable work and may actually put off
potential instructors from teaching the courses on the
topic. Furthermore, the difficulty of developing product-
related examples for broader use in core chemical engi-
neering courses (e.g. chemical thermodynamics, fluid
Successful experiences in PDE teaching
Despite the difficulties that have to be faced to teach
PDE and the fact that this topic is far from being
universally taught to chemical engineers, as reported
above, it should be emphasized that a significant number
of university institutions have taken up the challenge.
Many world top institutions, such as the MIT, the Uni-
versity of Cambridge, the ENSIC Nancy/Université de
Lorraine, the University of Groningen and the Otto-von-
Guericke University Magdeburg have been developing

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16 Frontiers of chemical engineering

Figure 3

(a) Market-pull products (a markrt looking for a (b) Demanding/competitive/dynamic markets

technology)
Promoting effective dialogue between all internal and
external stakeholders
Platform products (diversifying anexisting technology) Complexity of the development process/countless details to
be taken into account
Technology-push products (a technology looking for a
market) Time pressure
Customised products (tuning a product to respond to
specific orders) Managing multidisciplinary efforts

Cost & time vs risk

Quick-build products (rapid design-build-test cycles)
Establishing technical trade-offs
Complex systems (many interacting subsystems and
components)
Level of creativity required
High risk products (increased risk due to technica; or 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
market uncertainties) Percentage of respondents
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Percentage of respondents

(d) (d)
Process Simulation
Formulation
Project technologies
Models (e.g. physico-chemical, sensory
management Particle
processing
Data Unit operations
NPD process
Material sciences
Products/technologies
Process Design

Intellectual Transferable skills

Other property
Fluid mechanics Rheology
Physical chemistry
Manufacturing processes
industry
IT/modeling skills Organic chemistry
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Marketing
Percentage of respondents
research
Transport
phenomena Thermodynamics

academia
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering

(a) Key industrial survey results 1 - The most common NPD ‘drivers’ in the company. (b) Key industrial survey results 2 - Challenges for NPD in
the company. (c) Key industrial survey results 3 - Unmet needs in NPD. (d) Positioning map comparing academic and industry views on the
relevance of selected curriculum items to PDE as elucidated by the EFCE-PDE survey. All curriculum subjects represented in the positioning map
were marked as highly relevant to PDE by at least by 50% of the respondents either from academia or industry.

PDE as a topic of their chemical engineering pro- Naturally, process design courses were the ones that were
grammes. The EFCE-PDE survey documented the more prone to changes aligned with PDE, but these
experiences of some of these universities (Table 2) pro- universities have also attempted to bring the topic into
viding an insight that might be useful for those who have transport phenomena, thermodynamics and unit opera-
not yet engaged into the journey of teaching PDE. In tions, among other. Additionally, over 70% of the univer-
most of the universities surveyed, PDE has been around sities introduced or reinforced courses on product-related
as a teaching topic for more than 10 years, and in almost science and technology, including biotechnology, particle
half of them it has been introduced before 2002. processing and formulation, and less frequently rheology
and material sciences, among other (Table 2). Around half
The way the EFCE reference universities incorporated of the reference universities have also been changing
PDE in the respective chemical engineering programmes the business-related component of their chemical engi-
varied, and several types of curricular changes aligned neering programmes to enhance teaching in PDE by
with the topic were reported in the EFCE-PDE survey increasing the coverage of new product development
study. They range from the introduction of PDE modules management, marketing research, intellectual property
to broader curriculum revision involving both traditional and/or innovation management topics. However, the
core syllabuses and new courses in relevant areas most common feeling among the survey respondents is
(Table 2). More than two thirds of the universities ana- that these topics are still deficiently represented in the
lyzed in the survey updated their core chemical engineer- programmes, being taught in dedicated but short, often
ing courses to include more product-related examples. elective, courses, or as implicit contents in more generic

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Past, present and future of product design engineering from industry and academia perspective Uhlemann, Costa and Charpentier 17
modules (e.g. operations management, entrepreneur-
ship). Overall, the curricular changes implemented in
the set of universities surveyed to implemented educa-
tion and training in PDE were generally described as
minor to medium modifications to generalist chemical
engineering programmes. In some cases, however, deeper
programme evolution aligned with PDE culminated in
specialization pathways offered as part as of their chemi-
cal engineering course provision. This model was fol-
lowed, for example, at the University of Groningen,
where a masters’ programme in Chemical Product Tech-
nology is available. Otto von Guericke University Mag-
deburg also developed a masters’ programme wholly
oriented towards PDE around a decade ago, which coex-
ists with another more traditionally focused chemical
engineering curriculum.
Not completely unexpectedly, the results of the EFCE-
PDE the survey indicate that success in getting PDE
incorporated in chemical engineering programmes
depends less on the factor time and more on the type
of curricular changes that are implemented in support to
the topic. In general, universities where PDE teaching
developed as part of formal curricular revision reported
higher success rates (6 or more on a self-assessment scale
from 1 to 10), and no correlation was found between the
success self-assessment rating and how long PDE has
been taught in the universities.
Matching academic and industry perspectives to
demystify the need to revolutionize chemical
engineering education
Figure 3a–c show the key findings of the EFCE-PDE
survey on the industry component. Figure 3a shows the
key industrial survey results related to the most common
NPD ‘drivers’ in the companies surveyed. Figure 3b
summarizes the biggest challenges for new product devel-
opment (NPD) in the companies. Figure 3c shows that
process simulation, modeling and data are considered the
biggest unmet needs for NPD which points to the future
of PDE approaches as NPD digitalization tools.
Table 3 underlines the top strengths and weakness of
graduate chemical engineers and the major challenges
faced by newcomers engaged in the non-commodity
product sectors and new product development. Matching
academic and industry perspectives, the position map of
Figure 3d shows some of the curriculum items considered
to be highly relevant to process design and engineering.
Unit operations, process design and information technol-
ogy (IT)/modelling skills stand out in the second quad-
rant of the map. These have been core subjects of
chemical engineering, highly relevant to the traditional
chemical process industry and commodity products.
While these topics might be only marginally integrated
in PDE teaching, the chemical product (non-commodity)
industries highly value these curricular areas.
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Industrialists responding to the EFCE-PDE survey
stressed that although the chemical engineers working
with them might have fewer opportunities to directly
apply traditional unit operations and process design, the
thinking framework they acquired when studying these
topics is an advantage when they are involved in new
product development. These data further demystify the
idea that reinforcing PDE in chemical engineering cur-
ricula will imply a breach on what have been the tradi-
tional core strengths of the profession.
It is also interesting to note intellectual property and
transferable skills being placed also in the second quad-
rant of the positioning map shown in Figure 3d. Industry
expects chemical engineers involved in new product
development to command and excel in these areas, but
in general, relevant academic training is still far from
ideal. In contrast, marketing research occupying the
map’s fourth quadrant is an indication that PDE teaching
tends to require an emphasis on marketing that is lower
than that some academics might feel compelled to put on.
Naturally, marketing research topics are essential for the
development of new products and they should be covered
in PDE teaching. However, in the industry practice,
chemical engineers working on the New Product Devel-
opment NPD workflow must have an understanding of
the whole process as well as multilingualism skills to be
able to interact with other functions in the company,
including marketing. Such multilingualism (in fact part
of the intellectual transferable skills mentioned above),
more than strong marketing training, is what employers
value when hiring chemical engineers and PDE teaching
should focus on developing these skills.
And a positive point to be emphasized is the common
great interest of both industry requirement and academia
training on topics such as physical chemistry, rheology,
particle processing, formulation technologies and project
management.
Further details on the EFCE project supporting this
article may be obtained in [12] or by contacting the
Federation’s Section on Product Design and Engineering
(http://efce.info/SectionPDE.html).
Required multiscale chemical product design
and process engineering modeling and
simulation
A seminal paper by Gani [44] may have triggered the
introduction of modeling into the PDE context. Model-
ing clearly is a core PDE tool since the dawn of the 21th
century. The multifaceted multiscale approach was first
suggested in chemical engineering by Villermaux [45]
and again parallels another central concept of material
science and engineering [43]. This enables the inte-
grated view from the nanoscopic (molecular) end-use
property up to the macroscopic (plant) level and hence
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2020, 27:10–21
18 Frontiers of chemical engineering
completely new opportunities as discussed by Charpen-
tier [46,47,48].
The product and processing options are considered in
conjunction, namely the triplet ‘molecular Processes,
Product, Process Engineering’ approach (the 3PE
approach) [46,47–52] and thus enable new opportunities
not available in the formulation technology case where
the process is assumed to be known and fixed.
Modern chemical engineering applied to product design
and engineering involves this multiscale integration of
the phenomena at both product scales (molecular, micro)
and process scales (meso, macro) as an integrated system
[53,54,55] (summarized in Figure 4, [52]). Many inves-
tigations on the multiscale approach and computer-aided
product design have been directed to the design and
analysis of a wide range of complex products in non-
commodity sectors.
However, there still exists many difficulties encountered
and challenges to be met, stemming from the numerous
degrees of freedom. As a result, the computational
requirements may become excessive for multiscale
modelling. Anyway, it is interesting to mention that for
the integration of the modelling and simulation methods,
the concept of multiscale modelling can be interestingly
presented on the integration of three modelling and
simulation methods, namely computational chemistry,
computational fluid dynamics and process systems
modelling [54]. Complementarily to overlap the PDE
frontiers of research, the Virtual Product Process Design
Laboratory (Virtual PPD lab) Excel-based software is also
Figure 4
Year
time scale
Hour
Minute
Second
Microsecond HΨ=EΨ
Nanosecond
Molecular
Dynamics
Quantum (Atoms)
Picosecond
Machanics
(Electrons)
Famtosecond
Å nm
The integrated multiscale system approach involves to understand how phenomena at a smaller length scale relate to properties and behavior at a
longer length scale of the chemical supply chain.
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2020, 27:10–21
proposed as an overarching tool for chemical product and
process design and for managing the complexity in the
verification of formulated products [56–58]. To illustrate
also, it should be mentioned a project on chemical prod-
uct design based on multiscale modelling which has been
launched recently [59,64]. The goal is a generic method-
ology for the modeling of chemical product design using
multi-objective optimization (product properties, struc-
ture and process, . . . ).
Summarizing, the multiscale modelling paradigm
requires modeling and simulation at different scales to
understand how phenomena at a smaller length scale
relate to properties and behavior at a longer scale of
the chemical supply chain involved in the product design
and engineering [33].
Conclusion: towards the “knowledge
economy” with PDE teaching and research
trends required for manufacturing in the
factory of the future in the framework of
industry 4.0
The field of Product Design & Engineering (PDE) is
concerned with the definition of new and/or improved
products based on the inputs of customer needs and/or
new technologies. PDE is the chemical engineering
contribution to the new product development (NPD)
workflow in the process industries which is looking for
solutions to important current product research chal-
lenges such as:
 bioavailability optimization,
 pharmaceutical materials science
Process
Simulation
Local CFD
Simulation Reactor
Simulation
Modeling at
Mesoscale
(Nano-objects)
length scale
μm mm m
Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering
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Past, present and future of product design engineering from industry and academia perspective Uhlemann, Costa and Charpentier 19
 new therapeutic approaches (gene/cell therapies)
 nanocomposites
 high functionality coatings
 designed food microstructure
 controlled release of food ingredients
 engineered perfumes
PDE also leads to the new manufacturing concepts that
result from its chemical engineering heritage. The
ultimate goal of this article is to contribute to the estab-
lishment of PDE as a chemical engineering universality
helping with the transition chemical engineering towards
the ‘knowledge economy’ [9,60] in which growth is
dependent on the quantity, quality and accessibility
rather than chiefly on the means of production.
It is the authors’ view, sustained by their experience both
in industry and academia, that a comprehensive discus-
sion of PDE as one of the building blocks of chemical
engineering education, research and practice seems still
to-day lacking, which prevents the PDE discipline from
having broader impact on academia teaching and research
and the reality of process industries. The purpose of the
present paper is to contribute to the mitigation of this gap,
providing an overview of the history (25+ years) and the
current status of PDE as well as outlining key areas for
further development of the discipline for the benefice of
academia and industry partnership.
This was obtained due to the EFCE-PDE project involv-
ing a literature review and an original survey study
involving industry and academic partners. The paper
discusses status and challenges of PDE and maps aca-
demic and industry requirements, unmet needs and per-
spectives for the product manufacturing in the framework
of Industry 4.0. the aim of which is to reduce raw material
and energy usage and to improve production efficiencies,
thus leading to the design of sustainable technologies.
This involves the development and use of industry
4.0 technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine
learning and big data concepts [61] with the objectives of
reducing resource usage, zero-polluting waste and mini-
mum energy consumption (i.e. circular economy [62,63]).
This involves the development and use of artificial intel-
ligence, machine learning and big data concepts [61],
together with the development of novel sensors and
non-invasive measurement technologies (e.g. signal and
imaging analysis) to better control process systems engi-
neering operations leading to safer productions.
In order to live up to its aspiration to be considered as a
new paradigm of chemical engineering, PDE will need to
increase its relevance and to gain a broader impact on
current practices in academia and industry, as clearly
pointed in Tables 1 and 3 and Figure 3a–d. This will
be obtained by applying chemical engineering tools to
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product design and engineering challenges similar to the
ones mentioned above and, more specifically, the multi-
scale approach to description, understanding and model-
ing of PDE phenomena ranging from nano, that is,
molecular levels of the creation of the end-use properties
up to the meso and macro levels of the production
equipment. This leads to the digitalization of NPD work-
flow where great progress [27,28] is currently being made.
Moreover, combined with the today new and emerging
field of 3D and 4D printing and functional materials,
industrialization of newly developed product concepts
needs to occur into flexible and smart manufacturing
technologies and into modular manufacturing units
resulting from the ‘industry 4.0’ paradigm (see e.g. the
discussion in Ref. [12]). It is to be expected that the
digitalized NPD workflows and modular manufacturing
concepts will holistically coalesce into product and pro-
cess design approaches: this was the conclusion of the
EFCE-PDE survey.
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
Acknowledgement
The authors gratefully acknowledge numerous discussions in their
industrial and academic context and, more specifically, within the Section
Group Product Design and Engineering of the EFCE.
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review,
have been highlighted as:
 of special interest
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Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 2020, 27:10–21