Mesoscience-based virtual process engineering

Abstract Accounting for complex mesoscale structures was found to be the key to predicting system performance from elemental properties, and hence a bottleneck for process systems engineering. The development and generalization of the energy-minimization multiscale (EMMS) model may present a continuous attempt to provide this key link, where mesoscale structures are characterized by analyzing the compromise in competition of the dominant mechanisms in the systems studied, and then an accurate and efficient simulation paradigm is established. This paradigm enables the integration of high-fidelity realtime simulation with virtual reality technologies to create a physically realistic digital counterpart of the industrial processes, that is, virtual process engineering (VPE). VPE may present a new research and development platform for process systems engineering. In long term, the seamless integration of physical and virtual experiments, either in situ or remotely, is also possible with VPE.