(390g) Attainable Regions for Profitability: Integrating Thermodynamics, Sustainability and Economics

Chemical processes transform feed streams into products by exchanging work, heat, and mass with their surroundings. A second-law (thermodynamic) analysis can be applied to the overall process to determine the performance limits of reversible operations, independent of specific reaction pathways. The reversible process establishes a benchmark: it defines the minimum work input required when ΔG > 0, or the maximum work output possible when ΔG < 0. As such, it also sets the upper (or lower) bound on the difference between the combined energy and material input costs and the revenue from product sales—a quantity we refer to as the gross profit margin.

In this work, we introduce a novel graphical framework, based on the Attainable Region approach, that constructs a geometric representation of feasible product combinations subject to thermodynamic and economic constraints. We derive the necessary conditions that this region must satisfy and demonstrate how the method can be used to identify product(s) or product mixtures that maximize the gross profit margin. More importantly, it enables the elimination of processes or chemistries for which the energy input costs exceed the net revenue from product sales—thereby identifying economically unviable options early in the design process.

For processes and chemistries that show a positive gross profit margin, this framework provides a way to assess whether those profits could, in principle, cover capital and additional operating costs.

With the drive to bring manufacturing back to the US. this method offers valuable insights during the early stages of sustainable process design, guiding product selection and feasibility analysis using only thermodynamic data and market information.