(194e) Incorporation of Sustainable Ammonia Synthesis Process Design with Enhanced Assessment Method into Chemical Engineering Senior Design Course

Sustainability has become a key subject in chemical engineering (ChE) practice, largely due to the challenges such as natural resource depletion, greenhouse gas emission, economic globalization, increasingly stringent environmental regulation, etc. To incorporate the concept into ChE education, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has listed sustainability as a crucial element in engineering curricula and stated that “Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability”. The senior capstone process design course is a key educational component to fulfill the goal, as it could incorporate subjects such as sustainable resources, biomass, energy efficiency, design standards and regulations, process safety, etc.

In this work, three ammonia synthesis process technologies are designed in the ChE 4451 - Process Synthesis and Design II, including (1) traditional Haber–Bosch ammonia synthesis, (2) large scale water electrolysis for ammonia synthesis, and (3) distributed wind-based water electrolysis for ammonia synthesis. Besides traditional design methodologies such as concept design, process simulation, heat integration, equipment sizing, and cost estimation, the new sustainable process requires enhanced assessment method to incorporate emission penalty, renewable resource credit, transportation cost, modular manufacturing discount, as well as safety/control concerns. The quantitative results show that if only traditional assessment is applied, the wind energy based distributed process could not compete with the traditional one. However, the new assessment method shows that the new process could have a competitive breakeven price when all the evaluation factors are considered.