Engineering Methods for Decision Making on Relative Sustainability: Process Simulation Approaches

Abstract

Computer-aided simulation has been an established technique for designing and optimizing new and retrofit processes, especially in chemical process industries. Process optimization has given rise to highly useful techniques of process integration and process intensification that over the years have reduced resource use and cost. These reductions contribute to sustainable technologies no doubt but do not capture the totality of sustainability as understood in the context of simultaneous reduction of environmental, economic, and human health impacts of technologies. More and more researchers are beginning to be engaged in attempts at incorporating the remaining sustainability indicators in simulation methods. Various commercially available tools can be used as springboard for developing newer tools that would be useful to designing processes that from a holistic viewpoint are more sustainable. This chapter is a discussion on such opportunities. The field of computer-based methods of design and optimization is already very mature. This discussion is not a tutorial in that sense but an introduction to the possibilities ahead.

“A theory is good only as long as it is useful”

— Henri Poincare

“Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason and demands the production of the objective fact.”

— H.L. Mencken