Selected Papers from the PRES 2003 Conference

A new conference on Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction (PRES) was first organized under the CHISA Congress umbrella in 1998. Following the highly successful PRES’98, a new tradition of regular conferences dealing with the issues relevant to energy saving, emissions reduction, and cleaner production has been established. Heat transfer, heat exchangers, heat recovery, energy conversion and related equipment, etc., play an important role within this conference’s topics; therefore, publishing a special issue that covers interesting selected papers has become a tradition. The PRES conference has been further developed and extended following the increased demand for targeting, energy saving, and pollution reduction in industrialized countries, which has become especially strong in the last years of the twentieth century. When PRES’99 (Budapest) and PRES 2000 (Prague) followed with growing success, it had become increasingly obvious that a conference dealing with the issues specified above had become paramount. PRES conferences have taken pride in extending participation beyond that of leading industrialized nations, attracting delegates from less developed countries as well. The 4th PRES conference was held in the beauty of Florence, Italy, on 20–24 May, 2001, and the 5th PRES 2002 was again organized under the umbrella of CHISA 2002 in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, 25–29 August, 2002. The golden