Twenty Years of PRES: Past, Present and Future – Process Integration Towards Sustainability

Abstract

The paper is targeted to provide an overview of the main achievements and ideas presented at PRES conferences. The conference history is now reaching its first 20 y – from 1998 to 2017. The first 11 y were covered by the previous review presented in 2009 and for this reason, the authors focused mainly on the most recent period starting from 2009. The conference has become one of the main vehicles of spreading Process Integration into various research directions and fields of possible implementation. The conference editions covered numerous important contributions towards sustainability. It is not possible to list all of them. However, at least some can be highlighted, but they are not the only contributions. Even this very short selection demonstrates the substantially extended scope of Process Integration, which has been achieved thanks to PRES conferences. Those reviewed include (i) Process Integration with Pinch Analysis, (ii) Process Integration with another approach, (iii) Development of heat exchanger systems for Process Integration, and (iv) other extensions of Process Integration for wider Process System Engineering. The paper shows how the Process Interaction tree has grown and branched out during the last twenty years.