(209d) The Sustainable Synthesis-Design-Intensification of Chemical and Biochemical Processes | AIChE

(209d) The Sustainable Synthesis-Design-Intensification of Chemical and Biochemical Processes

Authors 

Gani, R. - Presenter, Technical University of Denmark
Babi, D. K., Technical University of Denmark
Bertran, M. O., Technical University of Denmark
Frauzem, R., Technical University of Denmark
Garg, N., Technical University of Denmark
With the demands for efficient utilization of energy and water, better protection-control of the environment and correct-consistent use of raw materials, it is no longer sufficient to convert a selected raw material to a desired product, making profit and ensuring operability. The synthesized-designed process must now also be sustainable, incorporating not only economic feasibility but also environmental impact constraints, energy-water usage and/or waste constraints, resources availability constraints, product demand-price constraints and, many more. That is, the demands for new, innovative and sustainable processes need to be addressed. Process intensification has been identified as an important means to achieve this demand through integration with process synthesis-design in the early stage development of any chemical and biochemical process.

The presentation will highlight the issues related to defining the measures of sustainability through which new alternatives can be evaluated. Here, emphasis is given to the concept of sustainability, which is relative and therefore, a reference case first needs to be established. That is, compared to the base case, how sustainable are the new and innovative chemical and biochemical process designs?

A systematic multi-stage and multi-dimension computer aided framework which provides the necessary work-flow, the corresponding data-flow, the associated methods and the needed computational tools will be presented.

Through case studies involving chemical and biochemical processes, the application of the framework and the associated methods-tools to determine more sustainable solutions will be illustrated. It will be shown that significant improvements and non-tradeoff sustainable can be obtained through this integrated approach of combining process intensification as an essential element of process synthesis-design.