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A METHODOLOGY FOR THE EVALUATION OF PROCESS SUSTAINABILITY
Citation:
Gonzalez*, M A., R L. Smith*, AND T Becker**. A METHODOLOGY FOR THE EVALUATION OF PROCESS SUSTAINABILITY. Presented at AIChE, Indianapolis, IN, November 03 - 08, 2002.
Description:
The twelve principles of green chemistry (Anastas and Warner, 1998) provide a foundation and pathway which allows researchers to incorporate greenness into existing reactions or when developing new technologies. Research from our laboratory (Gonzalez and Becker, 2002) has adopted many of these principles and utilizes them as a major component of our research philosophy. Some of the principles incorporated include atom economy, green catalyst development, elimination of waste and by-product formation and energy conservation to name a few. An area of research that can strongly benefit from the philosophy of green chemistry is the selective oxidation of hydrocarbons. This industry experiences costs, both environmental and monetary which are associated with excessive energy demands for maintaining reaction conditions, feed stream recycle and product separations, toxicological concerns of any employed solvents and/or catalysts, and resource depletion due to low reaction efficiencies and by-product formation. In an effort to demonstrate the potential of a green oxidation catalyst (Gonzalez and Becker, 2002), research into the selective partial oxidation of cyclohexane into cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone at mild reaction conditions was undertaken. The study demonstrated the use of a homogeneous green catalyst that could utilize molecular oxygen as the sole oxidant and selectively produce cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone as the only products at 125°C after 4 hours in a batch reactor. As the trend in the development of green and sustainable technologies continues, some of these novel reactions and processes may have the potential to be implemented on the production scale. In order to determine if a new technology is an improvement an evaluation of the net environmental benefit is needed. Although a technology may appear to possess the necessary components to be labeled as green or sustainable, the process has to be evaluated for its true environmental-friendliness and sustainability. To be presented is a methodology and framework that allows for an evaluation of a reaction, either on the bench or process scale, for its overall effectiveness in the areas of: Efficiency, Energy, Environment, and Economics (The 4E's). Also to be detailed is an evaluation of our selective oxidation of cyclohexane reaction using this sustainability model. Most importantly, this evaluation tool will allow for similar reactions but different processes to be directly compared so that one can determine which process is more sustainable.