The SuPER (Sustainable Process Engineering Research) Team has been founded in September 2012 by unifying the former Leonardo Chemical Engineering group at Politecnico di Milano represented by Professor Flavio Manenti, and the Chemical Plants group at University of Milan, represented by Professor Carlo Pirola, achieving an inter-institutional status.
Despite its recent birth, the SuPER Team has inherited skills, competences, codes, and plants from its former pioneers Professor Ragaini and Professor Biardi for the Chemical Plants, Professor Dente and Professor Ranzi for kinetic- and reactor-scale activities, Professor Buzzi-Ferraris for digitalization.
Nowadays, the SuPER Team consists of 10 permanent staff, 10+ researchers and 20+ collaborators (including visiting scientists and students), with 6 different laboratories and computing facilities. It is active in the industrial chemistry and chemical engineering for both fundamental research and industrial applications for decarbonization, digitalization and clean technologies with main focus on green/blue hydrogen production, CO2 capture and utilization, production / energy / nexus efficiency.
Since the future of academic and industrial research will involve more and more inter-disciplinary aspects, the strength of our team rely on the complementary skills owned by the original groups: the experimental and analytical potential in Indusstrial Chemistry is now coupled synergistically with the modeling and optimization methodologies of the Chemical Engineering. This special feature allows us to address each research project in a unified way and with a broader overview of the chemical, physical, and biological phenomena.
In 2018, the research team of Professor Giorgia Spigno, Catholic Univesity of Milan, merged with the SuPER team opening the new bio-engineering topics in sustainable food processes and finding a synergistic involvement with the team of Professor Laura Piazza. In 2020, the SuPER team became international thanks to the affiliation of Professor Alessandro Di Pretoro at Univesity of Toulouse (France), with a relevant impact on digitalization activities (Figure 1).
Since 2018, the SuPER team has been elected for the Presidency of the Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE), the Working Party of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) dedicated to the Process Engineering, Process Systems Engineering and Digitalization (Figure 2).
Look at the Team Staff HERE
