It is with much pride that I am

It is with much pride that I am able to write the foreword to our first issue of the (SAJCE) published by Elsevier. The Journal was originally published by the South African Institution of Chemical Engineers. I remember receiving copies of the journal by post in the late 1990s as an undergraduate student. However, the 90s ushered in the age of turbulence, and as we all know, engineers seemed to get busier, and needed to work harder to compete in this globally competitive environment. In particular for South Africa, this was a real challenge as our markets opened following the end of Apartheid and the end of the cold war. Our chemical industries changed, and the nature of our work changed too. During that period, we saw a decline of the contribution of mining to the SA GDP despite the longest commodity boom in history. Conversely, we saw some of our chemical engineer employing companies, such as South African Breweries, Anglo American and Sasol become world leaders. But, this world of expansion also led to a decline in our ability to publish our own journal. We had access to international journals and less time for reviewing papers for our own journal. In 2003 we published the last journal for 8 years.
Introduction
Bird-eye view approach
Summary, contributions and conclusions The general contributions of the works are:
Introduction Gmelina erk inhibitors oil (GSO) is a non-edible saturated vegetable oil extracted from Gmelina arborea fruit, available naturally throughout greater part of India, Vietnam, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, China, Laos and Thailand etc. Over the years, a tonne of research have been directed towards discovering the economic importance of this highly available non-edible oil. The potentials of the gmelina seed oil resource have been explored in the fields of; medicine and pharmacy (Sankh and Ashalatha, 2015; Oguwike and Offor, 2013; Ingole, 2013), bio-diesel production (Ingole, 2013; Sanjay, 2013; Sanjay et al., 2012, 2014), and production of lubricants (Oseni et al., 2013). From the available literature, it seems that no significant work have been directed towards exploring the potentials of the gmelina seed oil in alkyd resin synthesis which have important application in coating industry. Gmelina seed oil have been classified as saturated oil (Sanjay, 2013; Uzoh et al., 2014) which implies that neither the oil nor its derivatives can undergo auto-oxidation. This makes the oil a less prospective raw material for coating application where drying properties are considered of prime importance. It is pertinent to expand research, especially on tropical seed plants oils, to replace industrial seed oil that constitute food source with inedible ones. An oxy-polymerizable alkyd resin have been synthesized through green chemistry (epoxidation, hydroxylation, dehydration and polyesterification) (Uzoh, 2015). Hence, this opens avenues for further investigation on the potentials of the highly available gmelina oil in commercial processing of coating resins. One major issue identified in the course of the study (Uzoh, 2015) was the difficulty in predicting the kinetics of the alkyd polymerization process which basically allows for enhanced monitoring/control of the reaction progress and product quality. The need to address this problem motivates an elaborate study on the kinetics of polycondensation process in the batch stirred-alkyd reactor applied in this study. A comprehensive review of the literature reveals that detailed kinetics models capable of giving reliable prediction of reaction motion in alkyd polymerization process are basically lacking. The existing alkyd kinetics studies report simplified or lumped-condensation-type kinetics models which are valid either at high or low conversion (Lin and Hsieh, 1977; Aigbodion and Okeimen, 1996). The treatment of this problem led to the application of nonlinear state estimation techniques (Alvarez and Lopez, 1999), system identification/data-based regressive models (Araromi and Adegbola, 2014) and nonlinear model predictive control methods (Valeel and Georgakis, 2002; Eaton and Rawlings, 1992). Although the state estimation method due to its compatibility with discrete-time system seems to be a preferred choice for handling, monitoring/controlling the problems in polycondensation processes in recent polymer reaction engineering literature, yet, reports (Bachir et al., 2005–2008; Buruaga et al., 2003; Patton, 1962) show that the lack of reliable kinetics model occasioned by the complexity of alkyd polymerization mechanism, and other reasons related to the uncertainty of the monomer structure preclude the direct application of the standard estimation methods such as extended Karman filter and Luenberguer-type model-based observer to alkyd reactors (Bequette, 1991; Wang et al., 1997; Deza et al., 1992; Ciccarella et al., 1993). Various attempts to overcome this problem led to the development of geometric estimation framework (López et al., 2000; Hernández and Alvarez, 2003; Henerndez-Escoto et al., 2010), where the kinetics uncertainty is robustly reconstructed via a dynamic observer driven by discrete-delayed measurements. While these reports established the possibility of resolving the alkyd reactor prediction-estimation problem via geometric estimation technique, they also reveal that such a method may not be appropriate for studying the system as a distributed delay system where the measurements are more conveniently taken at variable time intervals. Moreover, the implementation of the geometric estimation method in the form reported in the referenced articles is strictly challenged by: