(398d) Cape Open Modules for the Process Sustainability Prediction Framework- Description and Applications

Sustainability in chemical production is a basic social, economical and engineering issue. The sustainability of a given production process can be examined using different methodologies based on process and plant data. It is advisable to introduce the concept of sustainability at design stage. In other words, the algorithms for measuring the sustainability of a given process should be included directly into commercial process simulators, so that chemical engineers could base their design not only on technical and economical, but also on environmental issues. This way it could be possible to incorporate environmental indexes into an objective function and, consequently, minimize the process impact by adjusting the design and operative conditions.

The software developed should be based on international standards in order to be compatible to commercial process simulators. For this reason, the Process Sustainability Prediction (PSP) Framework was developed using the CAPE OPEN(CO) standard. In this work, the PSP Framework structure its modules and applicability through a series of examples are presented.

The framework basis is the definition of some indicators that could summarize the sustainability of a given process. One-dimensional indicators (1D) and three-dimensional indicators (3D) have been used. For the 3D indicators, the methodology proposed by Martins (Martins et al., 2006) has been implemented. This methodology takes into account the material intensity, the energy intensity, the potential chemical risk and the potential chemical impact. The indicators' calculation is performed in the PSP Framework, starting form a toxicological database and from the material and energy balances, which are calculated by the process simulator and transferred to the algorithm through the CO modules. The PSP Framework contains also a 1D indicator methodology, based on the Waste Reduction (WAR) Algorithm. The methodology considers the engineering and toxicological data and calculates the impact through environmental indexes. The PSP Framework consists of four CO Unit Operation Modules interfaced with process simulators, a relational database (DB) containing toxicological and risk information, and a number of software tools.

The details regarding the development of the CO Modules and the description of the whole framework are presented in the paper. The PSP Framework has been tested using different process simulators: COCO/COFE, PROII and Aspen Plus. Representative examples are reported for methodology validation.