The course provides an overview of the issues that arise in the design of an industrial phase-separation process designed to recover chemical products from mixtures: from data acquisition and assessment of their reliability, to the identification of the most appropriate strategy in terms of efficacy and costs, depending on the process goals and composition of the starting mixtures. The main unit operations in chemical industrial processes used to separate and purify the components of a mixture are discussed. The student will learn: Principles of applied thermodynamic. Properties of solutions and mixtures. Role of mass balances on the driving forces acting on transport and mass transfer phenomena in nonequilibrium systems. Role of physical resistance factors on the speed of mass transfer. Design criteria for the separation of two components mixtures using different discriminating properties and related equipments (liquid-liquid extraction, distillation or rectification, absorption, adsorption). Design criteria for equipments based on single- or multi-stage or continuous contact (packed columns).