Design acceleration in chemical engineering

Nowadays, chemical engineering has to face a new industrial context with, for example, the gradually falling of hydrocarbon reserves after 2020–2030, relocation, emerging of new domains of application (nano-micro technologies) which necessitate new solutions and knowledges … All these tendencies and demands accelerate the need of tool for design and innovation (technically, technologically). In this context, this paper presents a tool to accelerate innovative preliminary design. This model is based on the synergy between: TRIZ (Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) and Case Based Reasoning (CBR). The proposed model offers a structure to solve problem, and also to store and make available past experiences in problems solving. A tool dedicated to chemical engineering problems, is created on this model and a simple example is treated to explain the possibilities of this tool.