State of the art in process integration

The research in process integration started in the late 1970s and early 1980s with an emphasis on energy conservation. Systematic methods for the design of heat exchanger networks were developed. Although this was only a small part of the total problem of the synthesis of complete manufacturing systems in the process industries, it has nevertheless been an important phase in the development of process integration techniques. The ideas and techniques developed to solve the heat exchanger networks problem provided the basis for the extension of the technology into new areas. Research in process integration now covers a much wider area than energy conservation and the scope has broadened to include raw materials efficiency, emissions reduction and process operations.