The wide range of products produced by the chemical sector underpins industries and businesses and is vital for living in a modern society. Modern production networks encompass hun­dreds of chemical processes generating a myriad of valuable products from a variety of raw mate­rials and intermediates. Chemical processes thus enable supply and value chains spanning essen­tially all modern manufacturing industries. However, they consume large amounts of energy and re­sources and still emit numerous substances and materials to the ecosystem, making them un­sus­tainable on the long run. Driven by local resource availability, regional economic frameworks, and global market trends, modern integrated production networks are highly interconnected, com­prising a complex exchange of mass and energy flows. Yet, recent years clearly demonstrated the vulnera­bility of industries to both discontinuities of established raw material and energy supplies and their busi­ness models, the latter largely due to changing customer perception. This urgently calls for a change towards more efficient, flexible and sustain­able chemical process industries, neces­si­tating holistic out-of-the-box perspectives on the systems under consideration. CHASE re­sponds to those current cross-industrial change requests for sustainable solutions.

CHASE addresses the complexity of selected chemical production networks through a Systems En­gineering approach. Utilizing multiple scientific disciplines, CHASE combines the relevant do­main knowledge needed for chasing efficiency and flexibility bottlenecks. Accessing and connect­ing crit­ical (bio)chemical process data and turning them into credible chemical process information en­a­bles new types of dynamic process engineering models. Thus, trustworthy digital knowledge twins and widely accepted digital process workflows are created that are urgently needed to i) com­pre­hend and manage changes within linked production chains, ii) facilitate the intensification of well-established processing steps, and iii) enable the creation of new interconnectable pro­cessing routes. Addressing these demands, CHASE retains its well-established three Areas Process Digitalization, Process Intensi­fication, and Circular Process Streams.

Incentivized by both learnings derived from the projects of the first funding period and in­creased industrial demand, in its second funding period the center will i) expand its activities towards a wider range of industrial segments and use cases and ii) intensify the systemic aspects of its R&D approach. Accordingly, CHASE will expand its competences to include new waste streams, recy­cling and upcycling routes, and focus increasingly on process chains and smart ma­terial streams. In addition, we plan to explore the life cycles of circular streams to anchor the insights and efforts to the societal context of environmental sustainability.

For this, CHASE will cooperate in an enhanced, carefully balanced consortium comprising 20 highly innovative company partners, comprising both devel­opers and providers of various pro­cessing technologies and equipment and (bio)chemical processes operators on different scales and 6 leading scientific institutions, including the shareholding univer­sities JKU Linz and TU Wien. A comple­ment of meticulously selected, mostly international associated partners provides unique additional expertise on novel materials and digital toolsets, specific methodologies, new cutting-edge re­search infra­structure and international networks. Carried out at two strongly connected, thematically complementary research sites, the CHASE research program will establish the center as an open access point for sustainable chemical manufacturing, firmly embedded in the Austrian R&D landscape.