Volume 1 Issue 1, January 2024

The balance of ‘outside–in’ and ‘inside–out’ signaling is critical in tissue development and regeneration. This Comment highlights emerging strategies to engineer and manipulate this delicate equilibrium and fine-tune cellular responses using complementary tools in biomaterials design and synthetic biology.

Opportunities and challenges in data-driven chemical engineering thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and molecular simulation are discussed, and new possibilities offered by machine learning in these areas are assessed. Examples suggest how integration of data science and molecular simulation can prove impactful for the future of chemical engineering.

Chemical engineering principles will continue to help scientists design and optimize new medical devices, treatments and modalities. This Comment reflects on historical developments and potential opportunities in medicine for chemical engineering.

Heterogeneous catalysis will continue to be a fundamental pillar of chemicals manufacturing. The development of sustainable catalytic technologies requires a multidimensional approach, bridging atomic-level design with planetary impact considerations. Prioritizing sustainability metrics, industry partnerships and circular economy principles as well as raising public awareness are crucial.

Professor Arthi Jayaraman from the University of Delaware talks to Nature Chemical Engineering about her path to becoming a chemical engineer, focus on modeling and simulations, and thoughts on bridging computational and experimental research.

To mark the inaugural issue of Nature Chemical Engineering, we asked a collection of scientists working in different branches of chemical engineering to share their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for their respective fields.

Lignin contains both C–O and C–C bonds, where C–C bonds are highly resistant to cleavage. Now, a bifunctional catalyst enables the cleavage of the challenging C–C bonds in lignin to produce biofuels.

Fibers featuring anisotropic structures for liquid transport are often limited to specific liquids and are impractical for large-scale manufacturing. Now, a microfluidic fabrication technique produces continuous hemline-shaped microfibers with improved liquid transport properties and tunable flexibility.

Removing trace alkyne contaminants in crude ethylene is challenging by traditional catalytic hydrogenation. Now, adsorptive separation through advanced materials design selectively sequesters alkynes in a single-step pathway to produce high-purity ethylene from complex mixtures.

This Perspective discusses electrochemically mediated carbon dioxide capture systems, which can offer lower energetics than standard thermal methods, with modular scalability. New integrated configurations can further reduce costs and improve unit productivity, while further engineering of existing cell designs will enable more rapid implementation.

Bipolar ion-exchange membranes are a class of charged polymers that enable precise control of ionic fluxes and local pH, making them potentially valuable for many energy and environmental applications. This Review focuses on the fundamental physics underpinning their operation across multiple scales, from nanomorphology to integration within devices such as in bipolar-membrane electrodialysis (BPM-ED).

Carbon–carbon bonds are ubiquitous in lignin, limiting monomer yields from current depolymerization strategies mainly targeting C–O bonds. Now, a bifunctional hydrocracking approach uses a Pt/zeolite catalyst to break C–C bonds in lignin waste, achieving monocyclic hydrocarbon yields up to 54 C%.

Developing biointerfaces that combine the advantages of both monolithic and focal elements remains challenging. Now, a hydrogel that releases surface-modified granules and shows biointerface transition capability has been developed. This granule-releasing hydrogel manages colitis, accelerates wound healing, and facilitates cardiac tissue regeneration and mapping of cardiac activity with bioelectronic devices.

A flexible hemline-shaped microfiber featuring periodic parallel microcavities with sharp edges and wedges was developed using microfluidics to achieve unidirectional liquid transport along arbitrary pathways.

Protein engineering is a powerful tool to create new proteins with useful functions and behaviors, but it is slow, laborious and requires specialized knowledge, limiting its broad application. Here, the authors present a system that combines AI and experimental automation to autonomously engineer proteins without human intervention.

It is challenging to separate middle-sized molecules from complex mixtures using traditional molecular sieves. Here a metal–organic framework has been developed with dynamic molecular pockets that can adjust and accommodate alkynes preferentially, realizing efficient production of high-purity ethylene from its mixtures with alkynes regardless of their molecular sizes.

Gareth McKinley discusses the physical interpretation that lies behind the dimensionless parameters that are so widely used by engineers.