While the process engineering industry contributes to more than one sixth of China's GDP, its energy consumption accounts for more than 50% of the national total. Promoting energy efficiency is an urgent task for researchers in the field, thus offering a new opportunity for its development, says CAS President LU Yongxiang during his recent visit to the CAS Institute of Process Engineering.

    While the process engineering industry contributes to more than one sixth of China's GDP, its energy consumption accounts for more than 50% of the national total. Promoting energy efficiency is an urgent task for researchers in the field, thus offering a new opportunity for its development. CAS President LU Yongxiang made the remarks during his recent inspection tour to the CAS Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) in Beijing.

    Prof. Lu spoke highly of IPE's work in developing clean and high efficient conversion processes, its efforts in dealing with key issues for technology transfer, and its endeavor in capacity buildup for technique, process and engineering innovation. He encouraged the researchers there to stick to its features of process engineering in resource conversion and make fresh contributions to the industrial structure adjustment and technology upgrading in this country.

    Process engineering is a common discipline serving all process industries, mainly investigating motion, transfer, and reaction of substances in physical chemical and biological conversion processes. Its major tasks involve the establishment of high-efficiency and clean technologies, processes and equipment, for solving key problems in the transition of experimental results to industrialization.

    Aimed at such fields as biochemical industry, resources, environment, energy and materials, IPE is making efforts to intensify its capability of technology innovation, process design and engineering application so as to create research complex of process engineering and product engineering. Particularly, the institute is devoted to understanding of various complex systems at different scales from molecular engineering to product and process engineering by emphasizing trans-disciplinary research and following the strategy from the particular to the general, targeting general methodologies and high technologies.