By-product fuel gases from refinery operations are a major heat source in fossil refineries and their availability poses a challenge to the deployment of low-carbon heat sources. This study evaluates the valorization of refinery fuel gases (RFG) into low-carbon methanol via co-processing with residual biogenic gas streams from biomass thermochemical conversion. Results from techno-economic analysis indicate that up to 44 wt.% of biogenic blend is possible without the need for external hydrogen supply, while electricity and heat requirements per tonne of methanol change by -4 % and + 80% respectively. Nevertheless, at the 44 wt.% blend, the estimated methanol cost increases only by 2.4 % (0.43 EUR/kg), while the reduction in methanol carbon intensity is approximately 40 %. This highlights promising benefits that can contribute to the integration of bio-oils producing technologies within fossil refineries.

Acrylonitrile is a critical commodity chemical used to produce a variety of industrial polymers, such as carbon fibers, plastics, etc. Currently 90% of the global acrylonitrile production is based on propylene ammoxidation. However, there is no literature reporting the whole process holistically in detail, and which also looks into the energy utilization of the whole process including the reaction heat as well as the energy demands of the downstream separation. This original study provides a rigorous process design of the full process from a holistic viewpoint, covering 7 sections of acrylonitrile production (reaction, acid quenching, absorption-desorption, hydrogen cyanide recovery, acrolein recovery, acrylonitrile-acetonitrile-water separation, acetonitrile recovery sections). In order to further improve the energy efficiency, three energy integration strategies are proposed (1) Energy integrated downstream processing; (2) Systematic heat integration utilizing the heat of reaction; (... [more]

In this research, a novel process is developed that utilizes low density polyethylene from plastic waste to produce ethylene. In this process, waste polyethylene is reacted in a microwave reactor to produce ethylene. A conceptual flowsheet based on this reactor is developed in the ASPEN Plus environment. Heat integration tools are utilized to reduce the hot and cold utilities used in this process. This novel design is compared with the conventional process of making ethylene from ethane via cracking. A technoeconomic analysis is conducted to demonstrate the economic feasibility of this process.

Process Systems Engineering (PSE) provides the advanced conceptual framework and software tools to formulate and optimise well-considered integrated solutions that could accelerate the sustainability transition within the industrial sector. The landscape of advanced PSE is poised to undertake a considerable transformation with the rise in popularity of open-source and script-based software platforms with predictive modelling capabilities based on modern mathematical optimization techniques. This paper highlights three leading equation-based platforms—IDAES, Modelica, and GEKKO-that are increasingly utilised for the modelling, simulation, and optimisation of complex systems within the advanced PSE domain, alongside the strengths and limitations of each approach. Following this, we present a framework through which emerging techniques within the domain of Software Engineering could be leveraged to address these limitations, with a vision of improving the accessibility and flexibility of... [more]

This study evaluates the introduction of Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) process in two Colombian refineries, focusing on their potential to reduce CO2 emissions and their associated impacts under a scenario aligned with the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario defined in the 2023 IEA report. The work uses a MILP programming tool (Linny-R) to model the operational processes of refinery sites, incorporating a net total cost calculation to optimize process performance over five-year intervals. This optimization was constrained by the maximum allowable CO2 emissions. The methodology includes the calculation of surplus refinery off-gas availability, the selection of products and CCU technologies, and the systematic collection of data from refinery operations, as well as scientific and industrial publications. The results indicate that integrating surplus refinery fuel gas (originally used for combustion processes) and HTL bio-crude off-gas (as a source of biogenic CO2) can significantl... [more]

This study presents an economic analysis of a blue H2-N2 production system, using a novel intensified reformer system with a hydrogen production efficiency of 80%. The system’s ability to produce both high-purity H2 and N2 creates opportunities for small-scale blue H2 and distributed ammonia production. The system consists of three identical, optimized fixed-bed reforming reactors, a heat recovery system, and shift reactors. A dynamic model was developed to simulate three small-scale H2 production systems: 2.8 tpd, 7.1 tpd, and 17.1 tpd, enabling an evaluation of their economic viability. The results indicate that the cost of H2 production ranges from 2.7 to 3.1 USD/kgH2. Sensitivity analysis reveals that natural gas and CO2 transportation costs have a significant impact on the variability of H2 price. This research provides valuable insights into the economic feasibility of small-scale blue hydrogen production, offering a pathway to support the broader adoption of hydrogen technologie... [more]

Contains 423 original peer-reviewed research articles presented at the 35th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE 35). Subject categories include Modelling and Simulation, Sustainable Product Development and Process Design, Large Scale Design and Planning/Scheduling, Model Based Optimisation and Advanced Control, Concepts, Methods and Tools, Digitalization and AI, CAPEing with Societal Challenges, CAPE Education and Knowledge, PSE4Food and Biochemical, and PSE4BioMedical and (Bio)Pharma.

The document is the digital supplementary material for the article titled "Application of Artificial Intelligence in process simulation tool", submitted to the ESCAPE 35 conference. It contains additional information and figures.

Contains optimized design data, aspen simulation files for the three chemical heat pumps namely:
Isopropanol–acetone–hydrogen
2-Butanol–methyl ethyl ketone–hydrogen
2-Pentanol–methyl propyl ketone–hydrogen.
Optimization code (written in python) is also provided.

Contains 134 original peer-reviewed research articles and 10 extended abstracts submitted to FOCAPD 2024. Subject categories include Invited Plenary and Keynote Submissions, Advances in PSE Design, Design and Emerging Fields, Design and Energy Transitions, Design and Sustainability, and Design Education and Future of Design. The scope is process design as it applies to process systems engineering in chemical engineering, energy systems engineering, and related fields.

Achieving sustainability in the energy sector re-quires an economically viable path with a balanced tran-sition that does not aggravate environmental and socio-logical problems associated with current fossil-based power production. Increasing the grid penetration of intermittent renewables to realize a sustainable energy future without consideration of the balanced transition may result in devastating economic and societal impacts [1]. As we press for the minimization of renewable power curtailment, current fossil-based technology struggles to meet demand under extreme transient and part-load conditions. This results in dramatic reduction of efficiency and a corresponding increase in emissions of not only carbon, but far more devastating pollutants... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

There is a global consensus that steps must be taken to mitigate the impact of anthropogenic climate change. The Paris Agreement on climate change has been ratified by 192 countries and the signatories have pledged to make changes to their patterns of energy and land use that achieve “carbon neutrality” or net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) by approximately mid-century. In these countries, energy ministries, energy companies and utilities are evaluating alternative fuels and power sources that can deliver the heat and power required for a modern economy with reduced GHG emissions. While technically proven low-emissions alterna-tives exist for almost every application, most of these alternatives cost substantially more than the fuels or energy sources they replace. Consequently, most countries will use a combination of regulations, taxes and subsidies to distort the energy market in favor of the lower-emissions alternatives... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

Chemical Process Industries must navigate a series of changes in their operations to comply with increasing sustainability targets. These changes may involve the use of electricity-based operations, the implementation of carbon capture strategies, and the use of biomass or end-of-life carbon-containing waste as feedstocks. De-carbonizing oil refineries is particularly challenging as they possess highly valuable infrastructure. Discarding this infrastructure before the end of its life to build entirely new electric and biomass-based operations does not seem to be an economical or even a sustainable solution. This presentation will cover recent work in my group related to the decarbonization of oil refineries, focusing on proposing solutions that could be integrated with existing plants... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

All ABET-accredited engineering programs mandate a culminating major design experience based on knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work and incorporating realistic appropriate engineering standards and multiple realistic constraints. Some chemical companies organize their Manufacturing Innovation Process into a sequence of stages which typically include Need Identification, Product Design, Basic and Detailed Chemistry, Process Design, Equipment Design, Plant Design, Detailed Engineering and Vendor Specifications, Component Acquisition, Plant Construction Planning and Execution, Operating Procedure Development, Plant Commissioning and Start-up, and Production Planning, Scheduling, and Operation. Each of these stages involve the solution of many "design" problems that could be the subject of the culminating undergraduate chemical engineering design experience... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

Process design is a core component of chemical en-gineering education and either involves or is followed by an extensive design project in most schools. The design project is often considered a core activity in the educa-tion of future chemical engineers because it develops their skills in creative and critical thinking beyond the boundaries of their acquired knowledge, as well as training them in teamwork. Such skills are likely to be crucial to empower students to develop process technologies that respond to the relevant future challenges in process design. These future challenges include accommodating alternative raw materials and energy resources, addressing sustainability concerns, and arranging production schedules that are more flexible... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

The overarching goal of process design (Figure 1) is to find technologically feasible, operable, economically attractive, safe and sustainable processing pathways and process configurations with specifications for the connectivity and design of unit operations that perform a set of tasks using selected functional materials (e.g., catalysts, solvents, sorbents, etc.) to convert a set of feed-stocks or raw materials into a set of products with desired quality at a scale that satisfies the demand. Process synthesis and integration can further screen, optimize and improve these pathways for given techno-econo-environmental targets or objectives. These objectives may include, but are not limited to, minimizing the overall investment and processing costs, minimizing the energy consumption, minimizing the emissions or wastes, maxim-zing the profit, and enhancing the safety, operability, controllability, flexibility, circularity, and sustainability, among others... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

The United States’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 has established incentives to facilitate the energy transition. While these policies provide economic incen-tives that encourage investment and may reduce financial risk for the private sector on the supply side, transitioning to a lower carbon or net-zero economy by 2050 presents several challenges. These include designing flexible production systems that can interact with inter-mittent renewable energy resources, ensure process safety, redesigning existing energy infrastructure to support new energy carriers like hydrogen or ammonia, and making long-term investment decisions in an uncertain and evolving market... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

We present the implementation of combined junior course projects encompassing three core courses: reaction engineering, separations, and process simulation and design. The combined project aims to enhance the vertical integration of process design learning through all levels of the curriculum. We design the projects to utilize novel modular process technologies (e.g., membrane separation) and to emphasize new process design goals (e.g., sustainability, decarbonization). Two example projects, respectively on green methanol synthesis and ethylene oxide production, are showcased for project implementation. Feedback from junior and senior students is also presented to motivate the development of such joint project in CHE curriculum. We will also discuss the challenges we hope to address to maximize student learning from this unique project.

Managing oil and gas produced water, characterized by hypersalinity and large volumes, presents significant challenges. This paper introduces an advanced optimization framework, PARETO, which offers a novel approach to strategic water management, emphasizing produced water (PW) treatment, quality tracking, quantification of emissions, and environmental justice. This work presents a case study showcasing different produced water management challenges. The PARETO framework demonstrated its effectiveness in optimizing water management strategies in line with environmental sustainability and regulatory compliance.

This paper presents optimal design for an energy-integrated biogas-fuel cell system for renewable electricity generation. The integrated process consists of two steps. The first step generates hydrogen from biogas via methane steam reforming (SMR), whereas the second step electrochemically converts this hydrogen into electricity using a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). These two steps are coupled via material and energy integration. Specifically, various design alternatives like anode and/or cathode gas recycling, biogas upgradation by CO2 removal, external versus direct internal reforming, and auxiliary power production through steam and/or micro gas turbine are explored to improve the overall efficiency and total annualized cost of the system. Specifically, a flowsheet superstructure is developed by incorporating all the available design alternatives. An optimal flowsheet with minimum total annualized cost is extracted from this superstructure using formal optimization techniques to mee... [more]

Reverse electrodialysis (RED) is a nascent renewable technology that generates clean, baseload electricity from salinity differences between two water streams, a renewable source known as salinity gradient energy (SGE). Full-scale RED progress calls for robust techno-economic and environmental assessments. Using generalized disjunctive programming (GDP) and life cycle assessment (LCA) principles, this work proposes cost-optimal and sustainable RED process designs involving different RED stack sizes and width-over-length ratios to guide the design and operation from the demonstration to full-scale phases. Results indicate that RED units will benefit from larger aspect ratios with a relative increase in net power of over 30% with 6 m2 membrane size. Commercial RED unit sizes (0.25–3 m2) require larger aspect ratios to reach an equal relative increase in net power but exhibit higher power densities. The GDP model devises profitable RED process designs for all the assessed aspect ratios in... [more]

Most studies in process systems engineering are applying incomplete methods when incorporating sustainability. Including sustainability is a laudable goal, and practitioners are encouraged to develop systems that promote economic, environmental, and social aspects. Ten methods that are often overlooked in performing sustainable process systems engineering are listed in this effort and discussed in detail. Practitioners are encouraged to create designs that are inherently safer, to be more complete in their identification of process chemicals used and released, to be complete in their definitions of supply chains, and to apply additional environmental impact categories. Other methods point to items that are factors in process systems engineering such as disruptive recycling, robust superstructures for optimizations, and employing complete sets of objectives. Finally, users should be aware that sustainability tools are available, which might have been outside of their awareness.

Computer-aided molecular and process design (CAMPD) tries to find the best molecules together with their optimal process. If the optimization problem considers two or more components as degrees of freedom, the resulting mixture design is challenging for optimization. The quality of the solution strongly depends on the accuracy of the thermodynamic model used to predict the thermophysical properties required to determine the objective function and process constraints. Today, most molecular design methods employ thermodynamic models based on group counts, resulting in a loss of structural information of the molecule during the optimization. Here, we unlock CAMPD based on property prediction methods beyond first-order group-contribution methods by using molecule superstructures, a graph-based molecular representation of chemical families that preserves the full adjacency graph. Disjunctive programming is applied to optimize molecules from different chemical families simultaneously. The de... [more]

In this work, we propose a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model to determine the optimal sustainable design of a poly(hydroxyalkanoate)s (PHAs) production plant configuration and its heat exchanger network (HEN). The superstructure-based optimization model considers different carbon sources as raw material: glycerol (crude and purified), corn starch, cassava starch, sugarcane sucrose and sugarcane molasses. The PHA extraction section includes four alternatives: the use of enzymes, solvent, surfactant-NaOCl or surfactant-chelate. Model constraints include detailed capital cost for equipment, mass and energy balances, product specifications and operating bounds on process units. To assess the feasibility of the PHA plant, we considered the Sustainability Net Present Value (SNPV) as the objective function, a multi-criteria sustainability metric that considers economic, environmental and social pillars. The Net Present Value (NPV) was also calculated. SNPV metric provides usef... [more]

Carbon capture is a promising option to mitigate CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired power plants, cement and steel industries, and petrochemical complexes. Among the available technologies, membrane-based carbon capture presents the lowest energy consumption, operating costs, and carbon footprint. In addition, membrane processes have important operational flexibility and response times. On the other hand, the major challenges to widespread application of this technology are related to reducing capital costs and improving membrane stability and durability. To upscale the technology into stacked flat sheet configurations, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that describes the separation process accurately are required. High-fidelity simulations are effective in studying the complex transport phenomena in membrane systems. In addition, obtaining high CO2 recovery percentages and product purity requires a multi-stage membrane process, where the optimal network configuratio... [more]