Sustainability drivers for process design

Since several years the society is asking to the chemical and process industry a growing commitment towards the development of sustainable and inherently safer production processes. As a matter of fact, beside conventional economic and technical drivers, the development of innovative production processes is increasingly conditioned by their environmental and safety performances, that influence the social acceptability of new technologies. The main determinants of the impact and safety of a chemical process are defined in the design stage. In particular, the early phases of the process design are strategic for sustainability improvement, since a higher number of degrees of freedom is present and modifications can be implemented with relatively limited costs. Given the current lack of widely accepted ex-ante methods to support process development and design, the research activities focus on the development of metrics, approaches and decision support systems that include environmental and inherent safety performances among the drivers orienting the conceptual and basic design of industrial processes.

The activities carried out in this research area are aimed at:

• development of metrics supporting the design of more sustainable chemical processes accounting for the specific features of the early design phase (e.g. data availability, uncertainty, scope of the design activities, context)
• development of a set of leading key performance indicators (KPIs) for lifecycle sustainability of perspective industrial processes, with particular reference to the ex-ante evaluation of the emerging technologies (production of new materials and by innovative process techniques)
• development of indicators for ex-ante inherent safety assessment providing a consequence-based quantification of the safety performance of a process schemes
• development of decision support system (DSS) based on methods for the integration, normalization and clustering of the indicators, aimed to the screening of design alternatives and identification of key drivers for improvement
• development of methods aimed to the identification of site-specific best design options

Research and Industrial Projects on this topic address:

• Selection of the more sustainable option among alternative process technologies during early design (polymerization technologies, acid gas emission control, production of bulk chemicals)
• Inherent safety analysis of emerging energy vector production and storage technologies (hydrogen, methanol, ammonia)