INSIDE THE CELL A New Paradigm for Unit Operations and Unit Processes?

摘要

Traditionally the chemical engineering paradigm for designing industrial plants has been to separately consider unit operations and unit processes.Although these terms are not prevalent in current curricula,courses in separations,reaction engineering,polymer engineering,etc.,reflect this traditional view.The usual scheme of process development starts at the laboratory bench.And with experimentation and exploration,conditions are optimized and then the process goes through a scale-up procedure to reach commercial production needs.Recent advances in MEMS technologies,however,have led to the implementation of Lab-On-a-Chip devices such as the integrated DNA analysis chip developed by Burns,et al.(see Figure 1).