The Chair of Process Systems Engineering (LPT) has been founded in November 1992 as a result of a joint initiative of RWTH Aachen and Bayer AG.

The Chair is directed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt and is part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The objective of the joint academic and industrial initiative was not only to strengthen chemical engineering research and education at RWTH Aachen but also to implement a process systems oriented academic group.

The group is organized in a project oriented matrix structure to foster efficient research collaboration between the members. The project teams are dynamically defined to react to a continuously changing environment and to support an efficient and creative research process.

The Research projects are carried out in various process systems engineering areas: modeling methods and numerical algorithms, process synthesis, optimization-based process control, information technology support to improve and facilitate model-based chemical and process engineering.

The applications include:

• fluid separations processes including distillation, membrane separations, desalination,
• crystallization,
• multiphase reactors including polymerization, fermentation and reactive distillation,

Our research is funded by a variety of sources including RWTH, the state of Northrhine- Westphalia, major national public funding organizations such as Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, or the Volkswagenstiftung, the European Commission as well as a number of companies. Many projects are carried out together with national as well as international collaborators in process systems engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, numerical analysis and scientific computing in order to complement our own expertise. Most notably, two interdisciplinary collaborative research centers (SFB 476 and SFB 540) have been established with substantial participation of the LPT in 1997 and in 1999 respectively.

Our research efforts raised significant attention on a national as well as an international scale. The scientific achievements of our research group have been acknowledged by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which awarded the Leibniz Prize 2001, the most prestigious german award in science and engineering, to Prof. Marquardt.

In order to foster collaboration as well as knowledge transfer between industry and universities, the non-for-profit organization AixCAPE e.V. has been founded in fall 2002 as a spin-off of the LPT. The major objective of this organization is transfer-oriented research and development in close cooperation with its industrial members. Initially, the research results of the LPT form the basis of AixCAPE's activities. In the future, other academic collaborators are expected to be included.