Maximum Production Minimum Pollution (MPMP), Necessary but not Sufficient for Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) is essential for modern economy. Sustainable Development Engineering (SDE) is a subsystem of SD and concentrates on the engineering sides of SD. Environmental Engineering (EE) is also essential for clean modern industry. EE is necessary for SD but is not sufficient, in order to make it sufficient the feedstock must be from Renewable Raw Materials (RRMs) sources. SD is formed of the sub-systems SDE, EE and RRMs. In this paper membrane catalytic reactors are used to achieve Maximum Production and Minimum Pollution (MPMP) by removing hydrogen from dehydrogenation side. The efficiency increases when a hydrogenation reaction is taking place in the other side of the membrane. This paper is addressing a practical case for this behavior giving MPMP which is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability. The further step to make it sufficient is the use of feedstock from RRMs which is not addressed in the paper. It is shown that the counter-current process is more efficient than the co-current one. This investigation and conclusions are obtained by reliable mathematical modeling, numerical solution and computer simulation of the model differential equations. More difficult ones for the Countercurrent case.