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A Visualization and Control Strategy for Dynamic Sustainability of Chemical Processes
Citation:
Li, S., Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado, AND F. Lima. A Visualization and Control Strategy for Dynamic Sustainability of Chemical Processes. Processes. MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, 8(3):310, (2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/pr8030310
Impact/Purpose:
Adverse environmental impact and unsustainable development caused by human activities, including chemical releases, exposure, and impacts have increased the needs for greener, economically viable products, and processes. This contribution describes the development of a novel sustainability-oriented control strategy for making chemical process releases safer and more sustainable. This strategy enables the incorporation of online performance assessment and process control with constraints for minimization of emissions into chemical process operations using the GREENSCOPE tool. The results show that the proposed control strategy can effectively drive the system to desired setpoints while meeting a preset environmental constraint and improving the transient environmental impact performance in terms of selected GREENSCOPE indicators. This work leads to a significant step forward towards augmenting the capability of process control to meet future demands and policies on multiple objectives (e.g., economic, environmental and safety-related) to minimize emissions and exposure. This contribution would be of relevant interest for stakeholders looking for feasible solutions to address the needs of safer and sustainable chemical process releases and minimize the potential risk and impacts of chemicals on the environment and human health.
Description:
Our societal needs for greener, economically viable products and processes have grown given the adverse environmental impact and unsustainable development caused by human activities, including chemical releases, exposure, and impacts. To make chemical processes safer and more sustainable, a novel sustainability-oriented control strategy is developed in this work. This strategy enables the incorporation of online sustainability assessment and process control with sustainability constraints into chemical process operations. Specifically, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s GREENSCOPE (Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator) tool is used for sustainability assessment and environmental release minimization of chemical processes. The multivariable GREENSCOPE indicators in real time can be represented using a novel visualization method with dynamic radar plots. The analysis of the process dynamic behavior in terms of sustainability performance provides means of defining sustainability constraints for the control strategy to improve process sustainability aspects with lower scores. For the control task, Biologically Inspired Optimal Control Strategy (BIO-CS) is implemented with sustainability constraints so that the control actions can be calculated considering the sustainability performance. This work leads to a significant step forward towards augmenting the capability of process control to meet future demands on multiple control objectives (e.g., economic, environmental, and safety related). The effectiveness of the proposed framework is illustrated via two case studies associated with a fermentation system. The results show that the proposed control strategy can effectively drive the system to the desired setpoints while meeting a preset sustainability constraint and improving the transient sustainability performance by up to 16.86% in terms of selected GREENSCOPE indicators.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: A Visualization and Control Strategy for Dynamic Sustainability of Chemical Processes
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