(45a) Advances in Biorefinery Sustainability Assessment Via Co-Design and Open Platforms

Sustainability assessment practitioners have a growing interest to integrate process design, technoeconomic assessment, and lifecycle analysis into cohesive frameworks. These frameworks should enable the rapid assessment of a growing number of biorefinery concept designs and produce lifecycles. Novel computational platforms are enabling the development of these frameworks. However, this development introduces novel challenges in terms of data gathering, model complexity, and result interpretation. Our research group is evaluating ways to advance sustainable process design while increasing design productivity and efficiency.

The BioSTEAM python package is an open source software that enables rapid development and assessment of process design concepts. Our group has developed over a dozen biorefinery designs using BioSTEAM. This presentation describes our experience in the use of BioSTEAM and its impact on designer training and productivity. Furthermore, we discuss ways to integrate machine-based codesign elements to accelerate time to design and result interpretation. Finally, we discuss opportunities for software adoption and integration with various platforms. Specifically, we will discuss the integration into supply chain analysis to understand the design of large-scale adaptive biorefinery deployment scenarios.