The safety of people’s everyday water consumption has been gravely challenged by wastewater from printing and dyeing, however, research on effective contaminants removal from wastewater is encouraging. In this experiment, attapulgite modified with Mg2+ was calcined, and chitosan was added to create attapulgite composites. By refining the experimental parameters of the preparation, the adsorption performance of rhodamine B in wastewater was enhanced. A fully automated specific surface area and porosity investigation, a method known as X-ray diffraction, and nitrogen adsorption desorption equilibrium temperatures at 77 K were all performed. The original and composite attapulgite samples were evaluated using BET, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. Composite materials were prepared using n (Mg2+)/m (AP) = 30 mmol/g, m (CS)/m (AP) = 1/3, a calcination temperature of 300 °C, and 1 h. After a series of adsorption experiments, manifesting that adding 0.2... [more]

Waste incineration with energy recovery is a matured Waste-to-Energy (WtE) technology which has contributed immensely to the disposal and management of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in industrialised nations. The adoption of this technology in developing countries is currently gaining momentum due to the numerous benefits that can be derived from its use. In this study, a techno-economic assessment of MSW incineration in proposed waste incineration facilities for use in Ghana was carried out. The technical assessment was conducted by determining the plant capacity and annual electricity production based on the combustible residues of MSW collected from various population sizes in the country, while the economic assessment was carried out by determining two key economic indicators, Net Present Value (NPV) and Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). It was found that a total of about 400 MW of electricity can be generated from the total of about 14,000 tonnes of MSW generated in the country daily... [more]

While there are software tools available for helping to conduct life cycle assessment (LCA), such as OpenLCA, these tools lack integration with process design, simulation, and optimization software. As LCA has a critical role in sustainable product design, this paper presents a platform called EMSO_OLCA, which integrates the LCA provided by OpenLCA into the Environment for Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization (EMSO). EMSO_OLCA incorporates a database of environmental impact assessment methodologies from OpenLCA and aligns with the principles of LCA outlined in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. Validation tests were conducted to compare the results obtained by the LCA of sugarcane ethanol using OpenLCA and EMSO_OLCA, revealing a high level of agreement. The average relative error was 0.045%, indicating a negligible discrepancy between the tools. Moreover, it took only 0.3 s for the calculation, which is desirable for use with process system engineering tools. A second case study was applied to... [more]

Flexographic printing is widely used in the packaging field, but there are still some problems in the printing of flexographic ink on non-absorbent substrates, such as low precision and unstable quality. In this paper, the printing process of flexographic ink is simulated. The interaction of fluid flow, temperature change, and solid deformation in flexographic printing is studied systematically by using the method of fluid−solid thermal coupling for the first time. The process of ink channel formation under static extrusion and fluid−solid thermal coupling was analyzed. The influences of printing pressure, printing speed, ink layer thickness, and ink viscosity on the ink channel were explored. The results show that the printing speed increases and the temperature in the stamping area increases. The printing speed is nonlinear related to the ink flow channel, the influence on the channel is slow at a low speed, the channel increases sharply at a medium and high speed, and tends to be st... [more]

The sliding wear of Ti-6Al-4V alloys coexisting with dental amalgam in a simulated temperature-controlled cell was evaluated. Disc-shaped samples of Ti-6Al-4V (n = 30) and spherical silver amalgam (n = 30) were prepared. Discs were subjected to wear while immersed in artificial and fluoridated saliva as follows: Ti-6Al-4V−Ti-6Al-4V (G1); amalgam−amalgam (G2), and Ti-6Al-4V−amalgam (G3). Samples were analyzed for mass variation, volume loss, and surface roughness. Wear tracks were characterized by scanning electron microscopy. Wearing induced significant mass loss for all groups except G3 in fluoridated saliva: Ti-6Al-4V (p = 0.045) and amalgam (p = 0.732). These samples presented an increase in mean surface roughness (p = 0.032 and 0.010, respectively). Overall, Ti-6Al-4V showed 0.07 mm3 (95% CI: [0.06−0.07]) higher wear track volume. Ti-6Al-4V has a higher mass loss when subjected to fluoridated media but no significant roughness variation. Fluor-containing substances should be avoide... [more]

Bacterial cellulose (BC) can be chemically modified and combined with other materials to create composites with enhanced properties. In the medical field, biomaterials offer advantages, such as biocompatibility and sustainability, enabling improved therapeutic strategies and patient outcomes. Incorporating lidocaine into wound dressings offers significant potential benefits. In this study, transparent BC films were produced in situ with an undefined minimal culture medium with a yeast and bacteria co-culture system on black tea (Camellia sinensis) and white sugar medium for three days. Lidocaine was incorporated ex situ into the BC matrix, and the composite film was sterilized using gamma radiation. Drug-release studies showed a two-stage release profile, with an initial fast release (24.6%) followed by a slower secondary release (27.2% cumulative release). The results confirmed the incorporation of lidocaine into the BC, producing highly transparent films with excellent thermal stabil... [more]

The future of computer-aided process design hinges on continued recruitment, training, and retention of the next generations of engineers. Many elementary and secondary school programs focused on engineering have made substantial impacts in informing children about careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). A report by the National Academies established three general principles for pre-college engineering education, the first of which is that elementary and secondary engineering education should emphasize engineering design. Curricula focused on teaching the engineering design process have been developed for K-12 students and educators... (ABSTRACT ABBREVIATED)

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)

Flexibility is a critical feature of any industrial system as it tells us about the range of conditions under which the system can effectively and safely operate. It is becoming increasingly important as we face greater volatilities in market conditions, diverse customer needs, more stringent safety and environmental regulations, the growing use of resources with varying availability such as renewable energy, and an increased likelihood of disruptions caused by, for example, extreme weather... (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)

At Procter and Gamble, innovation is based on a framework of Irresistible Superiority [1] that utilizes five complementary components – Products, Packages, Communication, Retail Execution, and Value. Increasing-ly, the computational techniques heavily leveraged with-in the Process Systems Engineering community are play-ing a leading role in delivering these five vectors, and they become increasingly valuable as we aim to deliver products in more exploratory consumer spaces – where combining high-volume data, advanced modeling, and quantified uncertainty will allow us to discover and deliv-er better products faster than ever before...

Some educators place an emphasis on the commonalities between engineering mathematics with process control, among others and this helps students see the bigger picture of what is being taught. Traditionally, some of the concepts such as diffusion and heat transfer are taught with a mathematical point of view. Now-a-days, Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as topic of greater interest to both educators and learners and new and disparate modules are sometimes introduced to teach the same. With the emergence of these new topics, some students (falsely) believe that ML is a new field that is somehow different and not linked to engineering mathematics. In this work, we show the link between the different topics from engineering mathematics, that are traditionally taught in UG education, with ML. We hope that educators and learners will appreciate the treatise and think differently, and we further hope that this will further increase the interest to improve ML models.

Chemical engineering is a highly complex interconnected major. Just as chemical engineers have broken complex processes into unit operations, the chemical engineering curriculum has been broken up into courses. The organization of these courses vary among institutions and are based on years of prior teachings and research. Despite this, there have been calls to revaluate the curriculum from both industry and academia. We propose a graph-based representation of curricula in which topics are represented by nodes and topic dependencies are represented by directed edges forming a directed acyclic graph. This enables using graph theory measures and tools to provide formal ways of evaluating a curriculum. Additionally, the abstraction is readily understandable meaning conversations between instructors regarding the curriculum can occur within a department and even across institutions. This abstraction is explained with a simplified curriculum and applied to the undergraduate chemical enginee... [more]

Equation-Oriented (EO) modeling techniques have been gaining popularity as an alternative for simulating and optimizing process systems due to their flexibility and ability to leverage state-of-the-art solvers inaccessible to many procedural modeling approaches. Despite these advantages, adopting EO modeling tools remains challenging due to the significant learning curve and effort required to build and solve models. Many techniques are available to help diagnose problems with EO process models and reduce the effort required to create and use them. However, these techniques still need to be integrated into EO modeling environments, and many modelers are unaware of sophisticated EO diagnostic tools. To survey the availability of model diagnostic tools and common workflows, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES) has conducted user experience interviews of users of the IDAES Integrated Platform (IDAES-IP) for process modeling. The inter... [more]

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.

Equation-oriented (EO) modeling has the potential to enable the effective design and optimization of the operation of advanced energy systems. However, advanced modeling of energy systems results in a large number of variables and non-linear equations, and it can be difficult to search through these to identify the culprit(s) responsible for convergence issues. The Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems Integrated Platform (IDAES-IP) contains a tool to identify poorly scaled constraints and variables by searching for rows and columns of the Jacobian matrix with small L2-norms so they can be rescaled. A further singular value decomposition can be performed to identify degenerate sets of equations and remaining scaling issues. This work presents an EO model of a flowsheet developed for post-combustion carbon capture using a monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent system as a case study. The IDAES diagnostics tools were successfully applied to this flowsheet to identify problems to im... [more]

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.

Triacetic acid lactone (TAL) is a bio-privileged molecule with potential as a chemical precursor, traditionally synthesized from petroleum. Current trends are shifting towards the use of renewable biomass or CO2-derived feedstocks to enhance sustainability. However, comprehensive studies on the techno-economic viability and carbon life cycle of such methods are limited. This study assesses TAL production from conventional glucose and a novel approach co-feeding Yarrowia lipolytica (YL) with glucose and formic acid (FA), aiming for a more cost-effective and eco-friendly process. We confront the inherent challenges in this process by exploring different technology scenarios using kinetic bioprocess modeling underpinned by techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) to identify the most cost-effective and sustainable routes to TAL production. A noteworthy component of our investigation centers around the prospect of recycling and utilizing the CO2 emitted from the YL bi... [more]

This work explores the economic and environmental opportunities for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in the Brazilian sugarcane industry. Brazil was one of the first countries to use biomass fuels for transportation and is currently the 2nd largest producer of the world’s bioethanol. Bioethanol produced from sugarcane can be upgraded to SAF via the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)-certified pathway alcohol-to-jet (ATJ); however, at least two challenges exist for commercial implementation. First, technologies to produce bio-jet fuels cost more than their conventional fossil-based counterparts. Second, there is considerable uncertainty regarding returns on investment as the sugar and ethanol markets have been historically volatile. As such, we propose a new optimization model to inform risk-conscious investment decisions on SAF production capacity in sugarcane mills. Specifically, we propose a linear program (LP) to model an integrated sugarcane mill that can produce suga... [more]

The study of sustainable design has gained prominence in response to the growing emphasis on environmental and social impacts of critical infrastructure. Addressing the different dimensions inherent in sustainability issues necessitates the application of many-objective optimization techniques. In this work, an illustrative four-objective design system is formulated, wherein uncertainties lie within two different socially-oriented objectives. A stochastic community detection approach is proposed to identify robust groupings of objectives. The findings reveal that the modularity of the optimal solution surpasses that of the average graph, thus demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed approach. Furthermore, a comprehensive exploration of the Pareto frontiers for both the robust and single-scenario best groupings is undertaken, demonstrating that using the robust grouping results in little to no information loss about tradeoffs.