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Reaction Chemistry & Engineering

The journal bridging the gap between chemistry and chemical engineering

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Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  is a Transformative Journal and Plan S compliant

Impact factor: 3.9*

Time to first decision (all decisions): 21.0 days**

Time to first decision (peer reviewed only): 33.0 days***

CiteScore: 7.3****

Editor-in-Chief: Dionisios Vlachos

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Journal scope.

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering is an interdisciplinary journal reporting cutting-edge research focused on enhancing the understanding and efficiency of reactions.

Reaction engineering leverages the interface where fundamental molecular chemistry meets chemical engineering and technology. Challenges in chemistry can be overcome by the application of new technologies, while engineers may find improved solutions for process development from the latest developments in reaction chemistry.

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  is a unique forum for researchers whose interests span the broad areas of chemical engineering and chemical sciences to come together in solving problems of importance to wider society.

All papers should be written to be approachable by readers across the engineering and chemical sciences . Papers that consider multiple scales, from the laboratory up to and including plant scale, are particularly encouraged.

Key topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Reaction engineering approaches or technologies.

• Reaction development & optimisation (including catalysis and catalyst design, mechanistic and kinetic studies, analysis and monitoring, mechanism and kinetics, screening, intensification and scale-up)
• Synthesis technologies (including electrochemistry, photochemistry and mechanochemistry)
• Reaction & process engineering (including continuous processes, reactor design, integrated reactors, microfluidics and new reactor concepts)
• Flow chemistry (including organic, inorganic, enzymatic, analytical and process chemistry)
• Digitalisation of chemistry and biochemistry (including analysis and monitoring, automation, visualisation, machine learning, algorithms, high-throughput discovery and cyber-physical systems)
• Biochemical engineering (including biocatalysis, enzyme engineering, bioprocessing and chemical biology)
• Materials synthesis & processing (including nanomaterials, nanoparticles, polymers, surfaces, interfaces and membranes)
• Separations (including reactive extraction/distillation and membrane-based processes) 

Biological, chemical, medical, environmental and energy applications

• Pharmaceutical and speciality chemical development  (including target identification and screening, synthetic route development and process design, intensification and scale-up)
• Sustainable chemistry  (including platform chemicals from bioresources and waste, alternative solvents, circular economy and efficient processes)
• Environment & climate  (including clean water, carbon capture, reactive and membrane separations, solar fuels and pollution abatement)

Why publish in Reaction Chemistry & Engineering?

By publishing in the journal, you will receive international exposure of your work to chemical scientists and chemical and process engineers from across academia and industry, as well as the other benefits that are part of publishing in Royal Society of Chemistry journals.

• Fast times to publication
• Efficient, fair and transparent peer review
• A dedicated editorial service
• Hot article promotion
• Free colour, PDF reprints and electronic supplementary information (ESI)
• Open access options

Find out who is on the editorial and advisory boards for the  Reaction Chemistry & Engineering.

Editor-in-Chief

Dionisios Vlachos , University of Delaware, USA

Associate editors

Ian R. Baxendale , Durham University, UK

Richard A. Bourne , University of Leeds, UK

Raj Gounder , Purdue University, USA

Saif A. Khan , National University of Singapore, Singapore

Francesca Paradisi , University of Bern, Switzerland

Laura Torrente Murciano , University of Cambridge, UK

Haihui Wang , Tsinghua University, China

Editorial board members

Shane Grosser , Merck, USA

Petra de Jongh , Utrecht University, Netherlands

Heather J. Kulik , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Anita Maguire , University College Cork, Ireland

Megan Smyth , Almac Sciences, UK

Malcolm Berry , MB Chemistry Consulting Ltd, UK

Claude de Bellefon , University of Lyon, France

Donna Blackmond , Scripps Research Institute CA, USA

Wayne Blaylock , Dow Chemical Company, USA

Cara Brocklehurst , Novartis AG, Switzerland

Jian-Feng Chen , Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China

Cathy Chin , University of Toronto, Canada

Evelina Colacino , University of Montpellier, France

Avelino Corma , Polytechnical University of Valencia, Spain

Anna Croft,  Loughborough University, UK

Paul Dauenhauer , University of Minnesota, USA

Stevan Djuric , High Point University, USA

Raju Kumar Gupta , Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India

Dorota Gryko , Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Ryan Hartman , New York University, USA

Joel Hawkins , Pfizer, USA

Ive Hermans , University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Volker Hessel , University of Adelaide, Australia

Lin Huang , Trunk & Petal Pte Ltd., Singapore

Klavs Jensen , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Marty Johnson , Eli Lilly, USA

Niket Kaisare , Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India

C Oliver Kappe , University of Graz, Austria

Alexander Katz,  University of California, Berkeley, USA

Francesca Kerton,  Memorial University, Canada

Beata Kilos- Réaume , Dow Chemical Company, USA

Dong Pyo Kim , POSTECH, Republic of Korea

Shu Kobayashi , University of Tokyo, Japan

Amol Kulkarni , National Chemical Research Laboratory, India

Alexei Lapkin , University of Cambridge, UK

Hélène Lebel , University of Montreal, Canada

Angeliki Lemonidou , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Guangsheng Luo , Tsinghua University, China

Haresh Manyar , Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Rebecca Meadows , AstraZeneca plc, UK

Massimo Morbidelli , Milano Politecnico, Italy

Timothy Noël , University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Matthew O'Brien , Keele University, UK

Tatsuya Okubo , University of Tokyo, Japan

Polona Žnidaršič Plazl , University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Anastasios Polyzos , University of Melbourne, Australia

Jeffrey Rimer , University of Houston, USA

Rebecca Ruck , Merck & Co. Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, USA

Andrew Rutter GlaxoSmithKline, UK

Basu Saha,  Lancaster University, UK

Susannah L. Scott , University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Doris Segets , University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Manish Sharma,  BASF, USA

Jay Siegel , Tianjin University, China

Ning Sun , Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

Annette Taylor , University of Sheffield, UK

Enrico Tronconi , University of Milan, Italy

Veronique Van Speybroeck , Ghent University, Belgium

Siegfried Waldvogel , Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany

Robin White , Luxembourg Institute for Science & Technology, Luxembourg

Karen Wilson,  RMIT University, Australia

Sheryl L. Wiskur , University of South Carolina, USA

Wen-De Xiao , Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Zhen Yao , Zhejiang University , China

Carmine D'Agostino , University of Manchester, UK

Maria Southall , Executive Editor, Journals, ORCID  0000-0002-7935-6231

Bianca Provost , Deputy Editor, Journals, ORCID  0000-0001-8440-1095

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Article types

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering publishes the following article types.

Communications

Full papers, minireviews, perspectives.

• Tutorial account

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering Communications contain novel scientific work of such importance that rapid publication is desirable. Authors should briefly indicate in a covering letter the reasons why they feel that publication of their work as a Communication is justified.

Full papers in Reaction Chemistry & Engineering contain original scientific work that has not been published previously. Please note that the Royal Society of Chemistry strongly discourages the fragmentation of a substantial body of work into a number of short publications. There is no page limit for full paper articles.

The purpose of a Review is to bring the reader up-to-date with research in a particular area. The article should aim to provide an authoritative, in-depth discussion of current progress. Authors are encouraged to identify areas in the field where further developments are imminent or of urgent need. Please note that Reviews in Reaction Chemistry & Engineering should not contain any original research.

Minireviews are highlights or summaries of research in an emerging area (typically from the last two-three years). Minireviews are not intended to be comprehensive overviews, rather they are meant to highlight recent and important developments in that specific area.

Minireviews should not contain any unpublished research and should set the topic in the context of the relevant literature . A small amount of speculation of possible future developments may also be appropriate in the Conclusions section.

Perspectives are invited contributions offering the personal viewpoint of leading scientists in their area of research. They present a state-of-the-art account of an area of current interest with an emphasis on future challenges and opportunities. Since the readership of  Reaction Chemistry & Engineering is wide-ranging, the article should be easily comprehensible to a non-specialist in the field, whilst at the same time providing an authoritative discussion of the area concerned. There are no strict length requirements, but as a general guide Perspectives should be typically between 6 - 20 pages in length.  Perspectives should not contain any unpublished research .

Comments and Replies

Comments and Replies are a medium for the discussion and exchange of scientific opinions between authors and readers concerning material published in  Reaction Chemistry & Engineering .

For publication, a Comment should present an alternative analysis of and/or new insight into the previously published material. Any Reply should further the discussion presented in the original article and the Comment. Comments and Replies that contain any form of personal attack are not suitable for publication. 

Comments that are acceptable for publication will be forwarded to the authors of the work being discussed, and these authors will be given the opportunity to submit a Reply. The Comment and Reply will both be subject to rigorous peer review in consultation with the journal’s Editorial Board where appropriate. The Comment and Reply will be published together.

Tutorial Account

Tutorial Accounts introduce readers to a technique, concept or methodology at the interface of chemistry and chemical engineering. They are didactic articles, intended to lower the barrier to entry for interdisciplinary research, and do not contain original research and are not intended to review the relevant literature . Authors should contact the Editorial Office in the first instance to discuss the topic before submitting.

Tutorial accounts may be of importance to a wide range of researchers, or of critical importance to a narrow range of researchers. There are no strict length requirements. Tutorial Accounts may cite examples from literature to illustrate key points but it should be possible for a specialist reader to gain a basic, workable understanding of the topic from the article without requiring further reading. Some comparison of alternative approaches may be appropriate, and authors can provide the reader with directions for further reading.

Journal guidelines

There are no specific requirements regarding formatting of submissions; we recommend using the Royal Society of Chemistry template but this is not a requirement for submission. All articles accepted for publication in our journals are edited and typeset to our house style by professional editors; we will format the final publication for you.

Open access publishing options

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  is a hybrid (transformative) journal and gives authors the choice of publishing their research either via the traditional subscription-based model or instead by choosing our gold open access option.  Find out more about our Transformative Journals. which are Plan S compliant .

Gold open access

For authors who want to publish their article gold open access , Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  charges an article processing charge (APC) of £2,750 (+ any applicable tax). Our APC is all-inclusive and makes your article freely available online immediately, permanently, and includes your choice of Creative Commons licence (CC BY or CC BY-NC) at no extra cost. It is not a submission charge, so you only pay if your article is accepted for publication.

Learn more about publishing open access .

Read & Publish

If your institution has a Read & Publish agreement in place with the Royal Society of Chemistry, APCs for gold open access publishing in Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  may already be covered.

Use our journal finder to check if your institution has an open access agreement with us.

Please use your official institutional email address to submit your manuscript and check you are assigned as the corresponding author; this helps us to identify if you are eligible for Read & Publish or other APC discounts.

Traditional subscription model

Authors can also publish in Reaction Chemistry & Engineering via the traditional subscription model without needing to pay an APC. Articles published via this route are available to institutions and individuals who subscribe to the journal. Our standard licence allows you to make the accepted manuscript of your article freely available after a 12-month embargo period. This is known as the green route to open access.

Learn more about green open access .

Themed Collections

Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  publishes a number of themed collections on timely and important topics, guest edited by members of the journal community. Members of the community are welcome to submit proposals for themed collections that would be of interest to the Reaction Chemistry & Engineering  readership. Please use the form below to submit a proposal. All proposals will be considered by the Editorial Board and assessed based on the timeliness and relevance of the topic.

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*2022 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics, 2023)

**The median time from submission to first decision including manuscripts rejected without peer review from the previous calendar year

***The median time from submission to first decision for peer-reviewed manuscripts from the previous calendar year

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Chemical Reactor Modeling pp 789–807 Cite as

Chemical Reaction Engineering

• Hugo A. Jakobsen 2  
• First Online: 01 January 2014

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Chemical reaction engineering (CRE) emerged as a methodology that quantifies the interplay between transport phenomena and kinetics on a variety of scales and allows formulation of quantitative models for various measures of reactor performance

• Tubular Reactor
• Continuous Stir Tank Reactor
• Temperature Equation
• Thermal Reservoir
• Gibbs Energy Function

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Recently a branch of CRE that is mainly focusing on transport phenomena and fluid flow analysis, rather than reaction kinetics, has emerged. By these groups the abbreviation CRE is frequently interpreted as chemical reactor engineering .

In Chap.  1 it was shown that when the total mole balance is used instead, the reaction term does not always vanish on the RHS because the number of moles may change in a chemical process. This total molar balance can be obtained starting out from the species mass balance ( 6.4 ), after dividing by the molecular mass for each species to obtain a species mole balance and finally sum these equations for all species in the mixture.

In classical thermodynamics a simple system is defined as a system that is macroscopically homogeneous, isotropic, and uncharged, that are large enough so that surface effects can be neglected, and that are not acted on by electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields [ 8 ]. A thermal reservoir is defined as a reversible heat source that is so large that any heat transfer of interest does not alter the temperature of the thermal reservoir. Such a thermal reservoir is a system enclosed by rigid impermeable walls and characterized by relaxation times sufficiently short so that all processes of interest therein are essentially quasi-static. Given two or more simple systems, they may be considered as constituting a single composite system. The composite system is termed closed if it is surrounded by a wall that is restrictive with respect to the total energy, the total volume, and the total mole numbers of each species of the composite system. In the present outline the universe is considered a composite system, the system represents a simple subsystem and the surroundings a thermal reservoir.

The Helmholtz free energy is sometimes denoted by \(\hat{A}\) ( \(J\) ).

The American chemist G. N. Lewis (1875–1946) introduced the fugacity function (Latin fugare , to fly) as a measure of the pressure adjusted for the lack of ideality [ 9 ]. For an ideal gas the fugacity is equal to the pressure. For a non-ideal gas we normally define the standard state to correspond to unit fugacity, \(f_i^0 = 1\) ( \(bar\) ).

This approach can also be adopted for liquid mixtures provided that an appropriate EOS is available.

The elements of Lagrangian mechanics are explained in Chap.  2 .

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Jakobsen, H.A. (2014). Chemical Reaction Engineering. In: Chemical Reactor Modeling. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05092-8_6

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• Published: 08 February 2024

Rethinking chemical engineering education

• Jinlong Gong 1 ,
• David C. Shallcross 2 ,
• Yan Jiao 3 ,
• Venkat Venkatasubramanian 4 ,
• Richard Davis 5 &
• Christopher G. Arges 6 , 7  

Nature Chemical Engineering volume  1 ,  pages 127–133 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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We asked a group of chemical engineering educators with a broad set of research interests to reimagine the undergraduate curriculum, highlighting both current strengths and areas of needed development.

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School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Jinlong Gong

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

David C. Shallcross

School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard Davis

Transportation and Power Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA

Christopher G. Arges

Department of Chemical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

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Correspondence to Jinlong Gong , David C. Shallcross , Yan Jiao , Venkat Venkatasubramanian , Richard Davis or Christopher G. Arges .

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Gong, J., Shallcross, D.C., Jiao, Y. et al. Rethinking chemical engineering education. Nat Chem Eng 1 , 127–133 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00029-1

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Published : 08 February 2024

Issue Date : February 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00029-1

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New Counseling and Psychological Services director announced

Loren Brown, who has served as interim director of Washington State University Pullman’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) since August 2023, has been appointed to the position on a permanent basis. His appointment begins on April 1.

Brown has over a dozen years of experience providing mental health services in higher education. He came to WSU in 2016 to work as a faculty psychology resident and biofeedback coordinator in CAPS, which is part of Cougar Health Services within Student Affairs. His responsibilities have grown since then; he served as associate director and clinical director before taking on the interim director role.

“Dr. Brown’s extensive experience in behavioral health, along with his understanding of the complexities of the college experience, is a tremendous asset for leading CAPS,” said Jenna Hyatt, associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs and dean of students. “I look forward to the ways he will enhance the experience of all students seeking mental health services at WSU.”

Brown will oversee the programs and services provided by CAPS, while also managing staffing and fiscal needs. CAPS provides focused therapy sessions for individual students, couples, and groups, and conducts mental health workshops for WSU Pullman students. As a member of the Cougar Health Services leadership team, Brown will be a key player on WSU’s threat assessment and critical incident response teams.

CAPS provides focused therapy sessions for individual students, couples, and groups, and conducts mental health workshops for WSU Pullman students.

“I am excited by the opportunity to be in conversations with Student Affairs leadership and campus partners to think about what is possible and how we can best serve the mental health needs of our students,” Brown said.

On average, about 10% of the enrolled students on the Pullman campus access CAPS services every year. During summer and fall 2023, students made over 3,500 appointments for initial consultations and individual counseling. In addition, 336 group counseling sessions were held covering a range of topics including anxiety, mindfulness, mood regulation, and trauma support.

Brown said CAPS is noticing an increase in students reporting experiences of social anxiety and isolation, noting the importance for his team to closely track mental health trends and be able to adapt quickly.

A big part of the preparation process, he said, is continually gathering and listening to student feedback.

“I want our team to listen to students and try to understand their mental health needs,” Brown said. “This will help us determine if the services we provide are meeting their needs and identify ways that our services can be improved.”

Hyatt said Brown’s extensive experience, combined with his dedication to staff and student well-being , will undoubtedly continue the success of mental health support on the Pullman campus.

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