Technology development is an exciting and rewarding role in chemical engineering. Achieving breakthroughs in yield or selectivity, creating new molecules or simplifying existing processes often require overcoming significant challenges and require creativity and understanding of chemical engineering principles. However, there are many examples of research that lead to technical successes but business or operational failures. Throughout the technology development, we need to assess the impact of the design on key Sustainability measures, such as business impact, operational reliability, environmental impact, community impact, and others. In this presentation, we will expand on the concepts that have been developed and presented by others previously and create a Sustainability measure and targets to guide the process development in order to create both technical and business success.
Sustainability is a key issue in the chemical industry, covering not only environmental impact of the chemical process, but also the utilization of the molecule produced, the financial impact of producing the material, the reliability of the process, the impact of the raw materials used, the energy consumption and its formation, and the impact on the local community where it is produced (emissions, jobs, etc.). The objective is to develop process technology that delivers improvement in the business operations without adversely impacting the overall Sustainability of the production. This presentation will introduce the Sustainability measure and consider how it can be applied to process technology development.
