This perspective paper focuses on the changes in teaching chemical engineering in Europe triggered by new challenges and megatrends observed in the chemical and related industries. Among the new teaching areas to address those challenges and megatrends, process intensification, digitalization and advanced materials are expected to play the most important role and are discussed in more detail. The discussion on incorporation of those new areas in the university curricula is illustrated with a comparison of educational approaches to the chemical engineering teaching at two universities – Delft University of Technology and Warsaw University of Technology. The aim of this paper is to focus the attention of university teachers and potential decision makers on the most important challenges for contemporary teaching of chemical engineering.

The role of capillary pumping on the course of cleaning porous materials containing liquid contaminants using supercritical fluids was investigated numerically. As a specific process to be modelled, cleaning of porous membranes, contaminated with soybean oil, using supercritical carbon dioxide as the cleaning fluid (solvent) was considered. A 3D pore-network model, developed as an extension of a 2D drying model, was used for performing pore scale simulations. The influence of various process parameters, including the coordination number of the pore network, the computational domain size, and the external flow mass transfer resistance, on the strength of the capillary pumping effect was investigated. The capillary pumping effect increases with increasing domain size and decreasing external flow mass transfer resistance. For low coordination numbers of the pore network, the capillary pumping effect is not noticeable at macro scale, while for high coordination numbers, the opposite trend is observed – capillary pumping may influence the process at macro scale. In the investigated system, the coordination number of the pore network seems to be low, as no capillary pumping effects were observed at macro scale during experimental investigation and macro-scale modelling of the membrane cleaning process.