You are here:
Development of Chemical Process Design and Control for Sustainability
Citation:
Li, S., G. Ruiz-Mercado, G. Mirlekar, AND F. Lima. Development of Chemical Process Design and Control for Sustainability. Babatunde A. Ogunnaike (ed.), Processes. MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, 4(3):23, (2016).
Impact/Purpose:
This contribution describes the implementation of a novel advanced control, sustainability evaluation, and decision making for the optimization of process design and operations to minimize environmental impacts as needed for SHC Sustainable Materials Management project. This paper will be submitted to "Processes" journal (www.mdpi.com/journal/processes).
Description:
This contribution describes a novel process systems engineering framework that couples advanced control with sustainability evaluation and decision making for the optimization of process operations to minimize environmental impacts associated with products, materials, and energy. The implemented control strategy combines a biologically inspired method with optimal control concepts for finding more sustainable operating trajectories. The sustainability assessment of process operating points is carried out by using the U.S. E.P.A.’s Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator (GREENSCOPE) tool that provides scores for the selected indicators in the economic, material efficiency, environmental and energy areas. The indicator scores describe process performance on a sustainability measurement scale, effectively determining which operating point is more sustainable if there are more than several steady states for one specific product manufacturing. Through comparisons between a representative benchmark and the optimal steady-states obtained through implementation of the proposed controller, a systematic decision can be made in terms of whether the implementation of the controller is moving the process towards a more sustainable operation. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is illustrated through a case study of a continuous fermentation process for fuel production, whose material and energy time variation models are characterized by multiple steady states and oscillatory conditions.
