Origins

EQUIFASE traces its roots to April 1983, when a number of Latin American researchers attended the third International Conference on Properties of Fluids and Phase Equilibria for Chemical Process Design (PPEPPD) in Callaway Gardens, Georgia, USA. Inspired by the exchange, they organized an International Course on the Thermodynamics of Phase Equilibria in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in July 1984, led by Professor Esteban Brignole. The course brought together an outstanding faculty — Bob Heidemann, Helmuth Knapp, Hendrick Van Ness, Juan Vera, Aage Fredenslund and Peter Rasmussen — and drew large numbers of participants from industry and academia, planting the seed for a recurring regional conference.

Concepción, 1987: The First EQUIFASE

That seed took form in March 1987, when the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile, hosted "Properties of Fluids and Phase Equilibria for Chemical Process Design," the first conference in what became the EQUIFASE series. Organized under Dr. Ricardo Reich, with support from UNESCO, CONICYT, the university and the Chemical and Mining Society of Chile, the meeting drew around 80 researchers from eight countries. It opened with a plenary by Peter Rasmussen and included short courses from John O'Connell, Rasmussen, and Esteban Brignole.

Concepción's lasting significance lies in the people it brought together. Attendees went on to organize the next several editions — Torres Marchal and Krishnaswamy Rajagopal (Salvador de Bahía), Arturo Trejo (Mexico), and Claudio Olivera-Fuentes (Caracas). At the Caracas meeting, Alberto Arce and José Tojo — who would go on to chair the 1999 Vigo conference — proposed formally extending the series as an Ibero-American conference under the name EQUIFASE, a name it has carried ever since.

The conference then rotated through the region roughly every two to three years: Salvador de Bahía, Brazil (1989, chaired by Torres Marchal and Rajagopal); Oaxaca, Mexico (1992, Arturo Trejo); and Caracas, Venezuela (1995, Claudio Olivera-Fuentes). In 1999 the series crossed the Atlantic for the first time, to Vigo, Spain, chaired by Alberto Arce and José Tojo — cementing its Ibero-American, transatlantic identity. The sixth edition returned to South America in 2002, held jointly in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, and Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, chaired by Esteban Brignole and Marcelo Castier.

The seventh conference had a winding path to realization. Mexico had been chosen at Foz do Iguaçu to host the 2005 edition, but when the original committee could not bring it together, a "Virtual Committee" led by Esteban Brignole invited Luis Galicia-Luna to organize the meeting instead. He secured Morelia — the historic "Ciudad Rosa," a UNESCO World Heritage site — as the venue, with local support from Delia Moreno Juárez and Medardo Serna González of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Held at the university's Cultural Center in 2006, the conference welcomed over 150 researchers from Mexico, Latin America, the US, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal, with invited speakers including Theo W. de Loos, M. Ángela A. Meireles, Cor J. Peters, Dominique Richon and Stanley I. Sandler.

The eighth conference, chaired by Eugénia A. Macedo of the Universidade do Porto, was held in Praia da Rocha, Portugal, from 17–21 October 2009 — a site chosen for its symbolic ties to Portuguese exploration and, by extension, the Ibero-American connection. With 200 participants from 33 countries, it was the largest EQUIFASE to date, featuring 14 invited talks (including lectures by Juan de Pablo, Juan Vera and John O'Connell), 30 oral presentations and 180 posters. It also introduced the first best-poster award for a doctoral student, a tradition meant to encourage young researchers.

The ninth edition returned to Chile in 2012, in Puerto Varas, chaired by Andrés Mejía and Hugo Segura of the Universidad de Concepción. The tenth, in 2015, took place in Alicante, Spain, chaired by Antonio Marcilla and Vicente Gomis, and covered topics from statistical thermodynamics and equations of state to ionic liquids, sustainability, biotechnology and education, drawing 120 participants from 23 countries. The gathering was tinged with sorrow, however, as it included a memorial for Professor Hugo Segura, who had died shortly before the congress; in his honor, the inaugural Esteban Brignole Award was presented to Dr. Pedro de Alcántara Pessôa Filho.

The eleventh conference, held in Córdoba, Argentina, in October 2018, was co-chaired by Martín Cismondi and Lucio Cardozo-Filho. By then, more than three decades after Concepción, EQUIFASE had become a well-recognized international meeting point, attracting over 150 participants from more than twenty countries across several continents, with 15 invited lectures, 17 oral presentations and 127 posters, all peer-reviewed before acceptance.

The series has continued with the twelfth conference in Campinas, Brazil (2022), chaired by Luís Fernando Mercier Franco, Mariana Conceição da Costa and Pedro de Alcântara Pessôa Filho, and the thirteenth in Évora, Portugal (2024), chaired by João A. P. Coutinho and Eduardo Filipe. The fourteenth edition will return to Chile, in Pucón, from 3–7 October 2027, chaired by Andrés Mejía — bringing EQUIFASE back, forty years on, to the country where it began.

A Shared Purpose

Throughout every edition, EQUIFASE's purpose has stayed constant: to promote scientific and technological exchange between academic and industrial professionals working on phase equilibria and thermodynamic properties for chemical process design. Its topics have grown alongside the field, from classical measurement and modelling for oil, gas and petrochemicals to alternative solvents, sustainability, biotechnology and molecular simulation — always delivered through plenary lectures, oral and poster sessions, and open discussion.

What began as an idea among Latin American delegates in Georgia in 1983, and took form through a short course in Bahía Blanca in 1984, has grown into fourteen conferences spanning Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Argentina and Portugal. The recurring names — Reich, Brignole, Trejo, Olivera-Fuentes, Arce, Tojo, Galicia-Luna, Macedo, Mejía, Cismondi and others — trace a living genealogy of mentorship, in which each generation of organizers was first shaped as a participant by the one before it. As EQUIFASE heads to Pucón in 2027, four decades after Ricardo Reich convened the first meeting in Concepción, it stands as a lasting testament to how one course, born of one conversation in 1983, became an enduring scientific community.