Dear Colleagues,

Reaction engineering is a discipline in which fundamental principles of chemical engineering, including heat and mass transfer, thermodynamic and fluid dynamics, are often blended together with kinetics. Reaction engineering is involved in many processes, from (renewable) chemical to alternative energy, and food and pharmaceutical processes.

This Special Issue aims to integrate the novel advances in the development of theoretical, computational, and experimental works on advanced chemical reactions to address scientific and technical difficulties/opportunities related to (bio) pharmaceutical processes.

Recent advances in computer hardware, numerical methods. and computational chemistry make it possible to develop and solve kinetic models of complicated pharmaceutical processes. The integration of existing chemical and physical models with emerging statistical and computational tools can serve as a promising route toward the automated design and optimization of (catalytic) pharmaceutical processes.

The combination of a mechanistic and nonmechanistic modeling approach with experimental methods that utilize kinetic data and uncertainty provides a suitable framework to balance the complexity and accuracy of pharmaceutical systems.

Formulating novel kinetic theories to explain new and/or unexpected experimental results for both microscopic and macroscopic reaction problems, as well as improving the understanding of earlier works, and exploring the relation between reaction phenomena in pharmaceutical fields, is desirable.

Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Design and control of multiphase pharmaceutical reactor systems;
• Experimental studies, mechanistic modeling, flowsheet simulation, process control, and process optimization for the following reaction systems during drug development:
  • Kinetic and mechanisms of heterogeneous catalysis, e.g., reaction mechanisms at the molecular level for atom- and energy-efficient conversions; chemical transformation of molecules on catalytic surfaces;
  • Application and environmental impacts of catalysts in pharmaceutical processes;
• Fundamental understanding of structure–property relationships in catalysts and pharmaceutical materials;
• Enhanced understanding of drug substance stability, e.g., degradation due to oxidation by kinetic rate determination;
• Alternative route of drug substance synthesis based on quantitative coupling of experiment/theory for kinetic reactions;
• Kinetic of drug synthesis by a continuous manufacturing approach, such as flow chemistry;
• Recent advancements in numerical simulations of reaction–diffusion phenomena;
• Monte Carlo simulations for enhance pharmaceutical kinetic understanding;
• Bioreactor design and role of reaction mechanism in drug product development;
• Polymer reaction engineering for affordable medical diagnostics such as kinetic of relevant polymerization systems.

Dr. Abdollah Koolivand
Prof. Dr. Blaž Likozar
Guest editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• advance kinetic reactions
• pharmaceutical processes
• drug substance and drug product manufacturing
• mechanistic modeling
• data-driven reaction mechanism
• simulation and computational approach
• flowsheet modeling