Abstract
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 tasks, 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.
Highlights
In recent years, integrating sustainability into the decision-making process in the chemical industry has become increasingly important
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
It is expected that sustainability will be a major driver for process systems engineering (PSE) to advance the capability of future chemical processes to deal with multiple control objectives while balancing conflicting objectives
Summary
In recent years, integrating sustainability into the decision-making process in the chemical industry has become increasingly important. A recent tool developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), GREENSCOPE (Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for the ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator) [7,8,9], proposed about 140 indicators in environmental, energy, efficiency, and economic aspects to evaluate a product or process in terms of sustainability. Many of these indicators have boundaries that do not consider the full life cycle, they provide comprehensive assessment of a process operation and can be normalized by a functional unit (e.g., production rate or total profit). The paper is closed with conclusions and considerations for future work
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