From laboratory to industrial scale: a scale-up framework for chemical processes in life cycle assessment studies

Abstract

Life cycle assessments (LCA) of an early research state reaction process only have laboratory experiments data available. While this is helpful in understanding the laboratory process from an environmental perspective, it gives only limited indication on the possible environmental impact of that same material or process at industrial production. Therefore, a comparative LCA study with materials that are already produced at industrial scales is not very meaningful. The scale-up of chemical processes is not such a trivial process and requires a certain understanding of the involved steps. In this paper, we elaborated a framework that helps to scale up chemical production processes for LCA studies when only data from laboratory experiments are available. Focusing on heated liquid phase batch reactions, we identified and simplified the most important calculations for the reaction step's energy use as well as for certain purification and isolation steps. For other LCA in- and output values, we provide estimations and important qualitative considerations to be able to perform such a scale-up study. Being an engineering-based approach mainly, it does not include systematically collected empirical data which would give a better picture about the uncertainty. However, it is a first approach to predict the environmental impact for certain chemical processes at an industrial production already during early laboratory research stage. It is designed to be used by LCA practitioners with limited knowledge in the field of chemistry or chemical engineering and help to perform such a scale-up based on a logical and systematic procedure.