Intensified continuous processes are a key innovation of the last decade for the production of high quality, high value and customer-specific products at competitive prices in a sustainable fashion. To realize the potential of this technology, key steps must be made towards long-term stable, tightly controlled and fully automated production. The goal of the CONSENS project is to advance the continuous production of high-value products meeting high quality demands in flexible intensified continuous plants by introducing novel online sensing equipment and closed-loop control of the key product parameters. CONSENS will focus on flexible continuous plants but the results will be transferable also to large-scale continuous processes. The research and development is driven by industrial case studies from three different areas, spanning the complete value chain of chemical production: complex organic synthesis, speciality polymers, and formulation of complex liquids. Innovative PAT technology will be developed for online concentration measurements (mid-resolution process NMR), for the online non-invasive measurement of rheological properties of complex fluids, and for continuous measurements of fouling in tubular reactors. New model-based adaptive control schemes based on innovative PAT technology will be developed. The project results will be validated in industrial pilot plants for all three types of processes, including validation in production containers that have been developed in the F3 Factory project. Further, methods for sensor failure monitoring, control performance monitoring and engineering support for PAT-based solutions will be developed. The exploitation of the new technologies will be facilitated by a tool for technology evaluation and economic impact assessment. A Cross-sectorial Advisory Board supports the transfer of PAT technologies and adaptive control to neighboring sectors of the European processing industry.

Sustainability assessment methods are needed to support sustainable technology development and to evaluate the impacts of existing solutions, products and technologies. While there are aspects and indicators that are common to all process industries, sector specific tools are required to address the sector specific features in a fair and transparent way. At the moment, several tools, assessment methods and indicators exist, but they differ in their goal and scope and are intended for different kind of use within companies, by consumers or by authorities to support policy planning and evaluation. Additionally, different tools are focused for different levels of assessment: product, company, industry or society. Thus the problem is not so much the existence of proper tools but rather the lack of understanding and knowledge on how they should be applied and in which context. Furthermore, suitable tools for analysing resource and energy efficiency within the process industries and across the different sectors should be recognized. The aim of the SAMT project is to review and make recommendations about the most potential sustainability assessment methods for evaluating energy and resource efficiency in the process industry. The analysis will focus on the applicability of different methods in industrial settings, the ability of the methods to support decision-making towards sustainable solutions and the suitability of the tools for cross-sectoral analysis. SAMT will evaluate tools that cover either environmental, economic and social aspects, or a combination of these, and apply principles of life cycle thinking. The project will consider demands and make recommendations related to sectorial and cross-sectorial assessment in a wide spectrum of process industries: cement, metal, oil, water, waste and chemical industry. To maximize the impact of the project the work will be supported by active dissemination activities including an implementation strategy as an outcome.