GAMS models and supporting spreadsheets for Innovative Strategies in Sustainable Formaldehyde Production in Belgium: Integrating Process Optimisation, Carbon Capture, and a comprehensive Environmental Assessment.

This is the OpenLCA Database for Innovative Strategies in Sustainable Formaldehyde Production in Belgium: Integrating Process Optimisation, Carbon Capture, and a comprehensive Environmental Assessment.

These are the slides presented at the ESCAPE 35 conference on Monday July 7, 2025, in the talk with the same name. They briefly introduce the concept of exergy with a basic overview, and provide seven easy examples that professors can use in their courses. The topics include heating systems, pinch analysis, energy efficiency, energy integration, steam generation, utilities, heat pumps, organic Rankine cycles, direct air capture of CO2, and CO2 compression and sequestration. See the linked conference paper for more information.

The introduction, peer review policy, and International Scientific Committee for Systems and Control Transactions volume 4 (ESCAPE 35 Proceedings)

This is the cover page and front matter for Systems and Control Transactions volume 4 (ESCAPE 35 Proceedings)

Optimal and autonomous daily use of new technologies isn’t a reality for everyone. In a societal context driven by sociotechnical transitions [1] many people lack access to digital equipment and skills, preventing their participation in digital social life, including energy services. Our exploratory and phenomenological research, guided by European Union directives [2], explores the social appropriation [3] of new technologies during the deployment of smart meters in Wallonia. The study investigates social behaviour of audiences with support during smart meter installation and identifies barriers to technology appropriation. In an exclusively qualitative approach, the field surveys aim to determine to what extent individual participatory forms [4][5] and collective forms [8][9] of support, through active pedagogies like experiential learning [6][7], can include digitally vulnerable users. The central role of field professionals as interfaces [10] is also highlighted within the service... [more]

Anomaly detection is a key technique for maintaining process suitability and safety; however, the quality of process data often deteriorates due to missing or noisy values caused by sensor malfunctions. Such data imperfections may obscure real faults. If anomaly detection models are too sensitive to such abnormal data, they may cause false positives resulting in unnecessary alarms, which may obstruct detection of true process faults. Thus, deterioration of the quality of process data may affect process performance and safety. We propose a new anomaly detection method that utilizes graph Laplacian regularization as a loss function considering data-specific temporal relationships. Graph Laplacian regularization is a mathematical tool used in image processing and denoising to smooth data. We assume that successive process data temporally close to each other have similar values and maintain temporal dependencies among variables. In this study, Laplacian regularization imposes significant p... [more]

The document is the digital supplementary material for the article titled "Closed-Loop Data-Driven Model Predictive Control For A Wet Granulation Process Of Continuous Pharmaceutical Tablet Production", submitted to the ESCAPE 35 conference. It contains the state-space equations, mathematical formulation, and additional figures.

To match the growing demand for biomethane production, anaerobic digestors need an optimal and time-varying adaptation of the input diet. Dynamic co-digestion constitutes a hard challenge for the limited instrumentation and control equipment typically installed aboard full-scale plants. The development of prediction models is foreseen to support process (optimal) design and control. In this work, a rigorous framework is applied to take full-scale applicability into account while dealing with the design and training of both high-fidelity and control-oriented first-principle/grey-box models, intended to be exploited for real-time optimization and actual process control respectively.

The transportation sector is facing a profound challenge to utilize a greater proportion of sustainable substitutes in relation to oil-derived products [...]

In this study, cradle-to-product life cycle analyses were conducted for a variety of natural-gas-based and coal-based SOFC power plant conceptual designs, while also accounting for long-term SOFC degradation. For each type of plant, four base case designs were considered: a standalone SOFC plant, a standalone SOFC plant with a steam cycle, an SOFC/GT hybrid plant, and an SOFC/GT hybrid plant with a steam cycle. The boundary of each base case was subsequently expanded to include either wet cooling or dry cooling options and DC to AC conversion, and was subjected to additional cradle-to-product life cycle analyses. The environmental impact results were computed using ReCiPe 2016 (H) and TRACI 2.1 V1.05 in SimaPro. The main factors affecting the midpoint impacts between cases were the plant efficiency and total SOFC manufacturing required over the plant’s lifetime, which were both strongly connected to long-term degradation effects. The findings also showed that the standalone SOFC plant... [more]

Selected Extended Abstracts from the Systems & Control Division Sessions of the 72nd Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference, October 23-26, 2022, Vancouver, BC

Selected Extended Abstracts from the
 Systems & Control Division Sessions of the 
71st Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference
, October 24-27, 2021, Montréal, Québec