Computer-Aided Process Intensification for Sustainable Process Design and Discovery: Methods and Tools

Increased competition, stringent environmental regulations, rise of unconventional feedstocks, and volatile markets have contributed to renewed interest in intensification methods for the chemical process industry. Process intensification synergistically combines multiple operations, such as separation, conversion and intermittent storage, within a single equipment. This drastically reduces the size, cost, energy consumption, and CO₂ emissions of a chemical plant. However, it is not always clear under which conditions intensification is desirable and where to intensify in a complex chemical plant considering the trade-offs between various economic and sustainability objectives. It is also not trivial to identify the hotspots for process intensification to achieve sustainability goals. Another long-standing problem is to be able to systemically obtain out-of-the-box process solutions. To resolve these challenges, we depart from the classic unit operation-based representation of chemical processes and propose a new representation using design building blocks. This provides a seamless transition from the phenomena-scale to the task/equipment-scale to the flowsheet-scale, and allows model-based screening and optimization of potentially advantageous intensification pathways that current designs do not yet support. In this talk, I will also discuss the development of SPICE (Synthesis and Process Intensification of Chemical Enterprises), which is a process design and optimization software prototype. SPICE enables “systematic innovation”, which is to say that a process designers and process engineers now can systematically discover out-of-the-box design/retrofitting solutions without exhaustively enumerating all plausible alternatives.