Self-Optimizing Purification: Digital Twins, Chemometrics, and Control in Membranes, Adsorption, and Chromatography
A special issue of Purification (ISSN 3042-6197).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 16 October 2026 | Viewed by 148
Special Issue Editors
Interests: green extraction and downstream purification; pulsed electric field and non-thermal processing; recovery of bioactive compounds from agri-food matrices and side-streams; separation process design and intensification; chemometrics and process optimization; sustainable food and biorefinery systems
Interests: CO2 capture; nature gas/biogas purification; sour gas (SO2, NOx, and H2S) removal; VOCs removal; energy storage; chemical sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Purification units rarely operate under fixed conditions. Feed composition changes over time. Membrane fouling alters hydraulic resistance and selectivity. Adsorbent aging affects mass transfer and usable capacity. Chromatographic beds lose efficiency under drift, resin degradation, or feed variability. These effects turn purification into a moving operational problem rather than a static design problem. This Special Issue will focus on methods that connect process measurements to model-supported action in three purification platform classes: membrane processes, adsorption and cyclic gas separations, and chromatography.
Submissions are invited on digital shadows and digital twins synchronized with laboratory, pilot, demonstration, or plant data. Relevant topics also include chemometric and soft-sensor methods for hidden-state inference, first-principles and hybrid models for online monitoring, model updating under drift, uncertainty-aware optimization, supervisory decision support, model predictive control, and validated closed-loop strategies. Application settings may include water treatment, gas purification, carbon capture, and down-stream bioprocess purification, provided that the central contribution concerns the operation of the purification step itself.
Particular interest will be given to studies that make the operational chain explicit, beginning with measurement and data reconciliation, continuing through state estimation and prediction, and ending with decision support or intervention. Comparative studies, pilot-scale demonstrations, plant-informed case studies, and critical reviews that clarify deployment barriers are within the scope of this Special Issue. Pure materials screening, stand-alone sensor papers without process integration, generic artificial intelligence applications detached from purification decisions, and retrospective prediction studies without operational implications are outside the main scope.
The aim of this Special Issue is to assemble a focused body of work that clarifies which sensing, modeling, and control strategies are sufficiently mature for trustworthy self-optimizing purification and where the principal barriers to deployment still remain.
Dr. Vasileios M. Pappas
Dr. Jin Shang
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
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. Purification is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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.
Keywords
- self-optimizing purification
- digital twins
- chemometrics
- soft sensors
- state estimation
- hybrid modeling
- model predictive control
- membrane processes
- adsorption and cyclic gas separations
- chromatography
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