This grant is to provide funds for partial support of graduate students, postdoctoral associates and US academic junior faculty speakers to attend the 8th International Conference on Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design, FOCAPD-2014, which will be held at the Suncadia Resort, Cle Elum, Washington July 13-17, 2014. The conference is sponsored by CACHE and the AIChE CAST Division. The major theme of FOCAPD-2014, "Innovation for Sustainability at the Interface of Process and Product Design", reflects an ongoing emphasis of chemical process and product design on sustainability both within traditional chemical processes and at the interface of traditional processes with non-traditional areas. The primary goal of FOCAPD-2014 is to create an academic and industrial dialogue, a critical assessment of existing enabling technologies, a discussion of research, education, and industrial needs, and a forum for new directions, challenges and opportunities in product and process design. The FOCAPD-2014 conference will feature two keynote lectures, 25 plenary lectures by world-renowned experts, a future challenges session featuring eight junior faculty, and three contributed paper sessions. The conference aims at attracting over 150 participants and over 100 contributed papers. It is expected that the FOCAPD-2014 conference will be an exciting meeting that will have a lasting impact for years to come.
Intellectual Merit: 1. FOCAPD-2014 will bring together and foster interaction among world-renowned experts from academia and industry, researchers and practitioners from government laboratories and several industries, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates. 2. FOCAPD-2014 will create a technical and scientific forum for the topics of integrated product and process design; enabling technologies in design: modeling, simulation, optimization methods and applications, operations; product and process design for energy and the environment; education, training and industrial needs in product and process design; and challenges and opportunities in frontiers of product and process design that include systems biology. 3. A special session on Thursday afternoon will feature eight outstanding junior faculty focusing on defining the new challenges and opportunities at the frontiers of sustainable chemical product and process design. 4. FOCAPD-2014 will foster the definition of new problems and challenges in the areas of sustainable chemical product and process design that will be motivated by changing industrial needs and feedstock availability.
Broader Impacts: 1. FOCAPD-2014 will aim at attracting the next generation of researchers in the product/process design area that is reflected in the graduate students and postdoctoral associates. 2. The conference will serve as a vehicle for dissemination of the state of the art in sustainable chemical product and process design through its fully indexed and citable proceedings that will include the plenary and contributed papers, its website, and more importantly through the informal discussions on research, education, training and industrial needs. 3. The chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and services/software industries will benefit by the introduction of new approaches, problems and technologies for discovery through computer-aided product and process design. Such technologies will lead to better products, faster response to consumer demands and more efficient utilization of manufacturing facilities, which has a direct benefit to the US economy.
It was our great pleasure and privilege to organize the 8th International Conference on the Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design (FOCAPD 2014), held at the Suncadia Resort in Cle Elum, Washington, USA, July 13-17, 2014. The FOCAPD series are the premier international conferences focusing exclusively on the fundamentals and applications of computer-aided design for the process industries. Held every five years, FOCAPD 2014 was the eighth in this series, and brought together researchers, educators and practitioners to identify new challenges and opportunities for process and product design. In the context of the conference theme "Innovation for Sustainability at the Interfaces of Process and Product Design" we solicited papers that emphasize the impact of computer-aided design on sustainability both within traditional chemical processes and at the interface of traditional processes with non-traditional areas. A total of 154 delegates from 23 countries traveled to Cle Elum, WA to participate in FOCAPD 2014 and included 35 representatives from industry and government as well as 52 students. This NSF grant, supplemented with industrial contributions, provided travel support for all junior researchers including students, postdocs, and junior faculty (71 total). In the context of the theme of the conference "Innovation for Sustainability at the Interfaces of Process and Product Design" we solicited papers that emphasize the impact of computer-aided design on sustainability both within traditional chemical processes and at the interface of traditional processes with non-traditional areas. We encouraged papers from all areas of systems, process, and product design, with particular emphasis on the following areas: Design for sustainability and energy efficiency Process design and the future smart grid Impact and opportunities arising from abundant shale gas Design for carbon capture and sequestration Design of non-traditional energy systems Design of sustainable supply chains Advances in process intensification Integration of risk modeling, uncertainty quantification, and process design Future process and product design education Bio- and pharmaceutical process design Design for safety Integration of dynamics, controllability, and process design Emerging tools for product and process design The conference program featured 33 invited plenary lectures and 96 contributed poster presentations. The contributed papers were allocated to three separate, non-overlapping and extremely well attended poster sessions to provide ample opportunities for discussion and interaction with the conference participants. On Thursday afternoon, we organized a special session focusing on the future challenges and opportunities within our field. This session featured 8 outstanding junior faculty members from the US, Europe, and Asia and was followed by a very stimulating panel discussion. All papers (plenary and contributed) were peer-reviewed by members of the International Programming Committee, as well as by other select reviewers. All accepted invited (23) and contributed papers (96) were included in the proceedings as part of the Elsevier book series Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering: Eden M.R., Siirola J.D., Towler G.P. (2014): "Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design", Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering (34), pp. 1-816, ISBN 978-0-444-63433-7, Elsevier. This provides a fully archival and indexed record of the conference. This aligns the FOCAPD meeting with the other major design conferences, i.e. the ESCAPE and PSE series, which both publish their proceedings as part of this book series. The publication of a fully archival conference proceedings is a point of particular pride for the conference chairs and sets a precedent for future meetings. The proceedings volume was provided to all participants as an eBook prior to the conference and is indexed on Scopus, Science Direct and ISI Web of Science. In addition, approximately 30 full length papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of Computers and Chemical Engineering around July 2015. The draft manuscripts are currently under review and we anticipate that the final papers will be submitted to Elsevier by April 1, 2015. Following the conference an online survey consisting of 24 questions was distributed to all participants. A total of 77 of the 154 participants completed the survey (50%) with the demographic distribution closely following the conference itself in terms of invited speakers, poster presenters, and industrial/academic attendees. In addition to the numerical results, the participants were asked to provide comments on various aspects of the conference including organization and venue. 98.4% felt the conference Met or Exceeded Expectations (60.3% answered Exceeded) 98.4% rated invited presentations Good – Excellent (95.2% answered Excellent or Very Good) 98.4% rated poster presentations Good – Excellent (82.5% answered Excellent or Very Good) Overall, we feel that FOCAPD 2014 was a great success as indicated by the post-conference survey results above along with the numerous favorable and complimentary comments made by the attendees both during the meeting itself and as part of the extemporaneous parts of the survey. The participants seemed most appreciative of the opportunities for informal discussions and networking, the quality of the speakers and the poster sessions, as well as the beautiful facilities.
