Hey Presto!

Leading last year's Higher Education Funding Council's research assessment into the teaching of chemical engineering, London's Imperial College collaborates with some of the industry's biggest names in process research.

Imperial's Centre for Process Systems Engineering, the largest in the world specifically for the process industries, brings together more than 100 researchers from a variety of disciplines. One of its key research facilities is the Process Concept Studio, PRESTO.

The goal of each PRESTO project is to solve `live' industrial problems, to demonstrate in anger the potential of new technologies and to reduce the traditional long time scale of technology transfer between academia and industry.

The initial phase of the Studio was jointly funded by the EPSRC and a group of 11 industrial partners, under the Innovative Manufacturing Initiative, in collaboration with the University of Teesside. Four PRESTO projects have been undertaken since 1996.

In one project, proposed by ICI, the throughput of a batch paints plant was boosted by up to 60 per cent. Following the development of models, the optimal design of a new plant was considered, to effect maximum return on investment in processing 200 products.

Another project, proposed by APV, developed novel computer-aided methods to improve plant safe automation systems for multipurpose plants. The last project in the initial series concerned the optimisation of an integrated air separation process for Air Products.

PRESTO is now moving into its second phase. A current activity, the Virtual Plant project with Silicon Graphics and the CadCentre, is prototyping the joint use of traditional 3D geometric models together with dynamic process models, all accessed from the Internet.

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