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Life cycle assessment in chemical industry – a review
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Andreia Santos, Ana Barbosa-Póvoa, Ana CarvalhoThis paper presents a review of research works where the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has been applied to assess environmental impacts of chemical processes. To accomplish this goal, a total of 46 papers, published in English-speaking peer reviewed journals from 2015 to 2019, were reviewed. These papers have been analyzed in terms of the most important decisions taken in LCA studies. These decisions include the goal of the LCA study, the applied system boundary, the ...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 26, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Sustainability indicators for end-of-life chemical releases and potential exposure
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Jose D Hernandez-Betancur, Gerardo J Ruiz-MercadoUnderstanding the chemical risk to environment and human health is an important issue when a waste management strategy and a control risk system are analyzed and selected. This is even more important at the end-of-life (recycling, recovery and disposal) scenario for a chemical due to the uncertainty in respect of the most susceptible receptors (e.g. workers), pathways (e.g. groundwater), routes (e.g. inhalation) and hazard (e.g. cancer) associated to a chemical exposure. Hence...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 26, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Engineering, markets, and human behavior: an essential integration for decisions toward sustainability
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Bhavik R Bakshi, Tapajyoti Ghosh, Kyuha LeeThe environmental impact of an engineered system depends on factors such as economic policies, efficiency of the technology, and the extent to which it is used in society. Methods for making decisions toward sustainability certainly account for technological aspects such as efficiency, but have been lacking in accounting for the broader economic implications such as the effect of markets and human behavior. These shortcomings can result in perverse outcomes: improvement in efficienc...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 26, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide to high value chemicals using gas-diffusion electrodes
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Souradip Malkhandi, Boon Siang YeoThe synthesis of value-added chemicals from the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is attractive from the perspectives of both sustainable manufacturing and environmental protection. In this review article, we first discussed the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction, relevant figures-of-merit, and configurations for electrolyzers and gas diffusion electrodes. We then summarized important developments towards the scaled-up synthesis of commercially valuable carbon monoxide, formic ...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 26, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Towards circular economy: integration of bio-waste into chemical supply chain
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Zhen Guo, Ning Yan, Alexei A LapkinCurrent chemical industry is heavily reliant on fossil resources as feedstock, resulting in a linear economical model, namely extract-make-use-dispose. In contrast, circular economy, targeting a more sustainable use of materials, aims to construct a loop in which waste is repurposed as feedstock. Circular economy in chemical industry may be achieved by integrating bio-waste into the chemical supply chain. However, bio-waste is different in many ways compared with fossil fuels, such as spars...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 26, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Chemical product design – recent advances and perspectives
Publication date: March 2020Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 27Author(s): Lei Zhang, Haitao Mao, Qilei Liu, Rafiqul GaniChemical industry is continuously looking for opportunities to manufacture the necessary commodity chemicals as well as to convert them into higher value-added chemicals-based products. Development of these chemicals-based products involves not only their design and/or selection but also their sustainable manufacturing through an appropriate chemical process, its marketing and its disposal as waste. This perspective paper considers mainly computer-aided methods and tools suitable fo...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 23, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Product design and engineering — past, present, future trends in teaching, research and practices: academic and industry points of view
Publication date: March 2020Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 27Author(s): Jens Uhlemann, Raquel Costa, Jean-Claude CharpentierProduct Design & Engineering (PDE) aims to define new and/or improved products based on customer needs and/or new technologies.A comprehensive discussion of PDE as a building block for chemical engineering education, research and practice seems still lacking, preventing a broader impact on academic and industry realities more and more concerned with the ‘knowledge economy’.The purpose of the present current opinion paper was to contribute to the mitigation of this gap by p...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 14, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Challenges in the design of formulated products: multiscale process and product design
Publication date: March 2020Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 27Author(s): Manuel Taifouris, Mariano Martín, Alberto Martínez, Nats EsquejoIn this work we provide an overview of the current trend in process and product design as a multidisciplinary area within process system engineering. This problem shows a strong link between different fields including economics, marketing, molecular chemistry, physico-chemistry as well as process design and all the way up to ingredients and final products supply chain. While the different stages in product design have been studied one by one, recent efforts aim a...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 10, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Challenges and opportunities in assessing sustainability during chemical process design
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Andres Argoti, Alvaro Orjuela, Paulo C NarváezThe need for incorporating sustainability principles as a design goal rather than a constraint has prompted major changes in chemical process design and engineering in recent decades. In this regard, sustainability assessment via economic, environmental, and social dimensions, a triad referred to as the triple bottom line (TBL), is becoming not only an accounting tool but also a means to re-evaluate the design of a given process or product. Nevertheless, the inherent complexity ...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 4, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Modeling technologies for desalination of brackish water — toward a sustainable water supply
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Soraya Honarparvar, Xin Zhang, Tianyu Chen, Chongzheng Na, Danny ReibleBrackish groundwater is a largely untapped water resource that is available in much of the arid US. The low salinity of brackish water (1000–10 000 mg/L TDS) makes it a viable alternative water supply for municipal, industrial, and agricultural applications. Improvements in desalination technologies are required to fully utilize these waters. Electrodialysis (ED), capacitive deionization (CDI), and membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) are t...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 4, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Application of electrochemical methods in heterogeneous catalysis
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Chunmei Zhou, Liu Tao, Fang Yang, Bei Wang, Xiaoyue Wan, Yuguang Jin, Hao Yu, Yanhui YangIn this minireview, electro-catalytic activation of some representative alcohols and greenhouse gases CO2 are taken as examples to comprehensively analyze the state of the art of electrocatalysis, and then recent research progress in the characterization techniques for electrocatalysis are also summarized, and several viewpoints on the further development of electrocatalysis are promoted in the end. Overall, further development of the el...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - November 4, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Carbon capture and utilization in the steel industry: challenges and opportunities for chemical engineering
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Kevin De Ras, Ruben Van de Vijver, Vladimir V Galvita, Guy B Marin, Kevin M Van GeemThe availability of green electricity, changes to the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) system and technological breakthroughs will determine how the steel industry will evolve in the coming decades. The blast furnace (BF) technology will continue to dominate steel production in the coming decade and the only way to substantially reduce the associated CO2 emissions is to combine it with Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) and/or Carbon Capture a...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - October 25, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Recent advances in anomalous transport models for predicting contaminants in natural groundwater systems
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Diogo Bolster, Kevin R Roche, Verónica L MoralesHigh degrees of spatial heterogeneity in hydrologic systems pose a major barrier for their protection and remediation. Dissolved and particulate contaminants are mixed and retained over timescales ranging from seconds to years due to their interactions with these structural heterogeneities. Over the last two decades, a new class of models has demonstrated its capacity to describe observed ‘anomalous transport’ behavior that is ubiquitous to nearly all flowing waters. The p...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - October 24, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Biobased chemical and energy recovered from waste microbial matrices
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Liew Chien Go, Dhan Lord B Fortela, Emmanuel Revellame, Mark Zappi, William Chirdon, William Holmes, Rafael HernandezAdvancement in bioprocessing has brought 3rd generation biorefineries closer to becoming environmentally and economically sustainable. However, due to the costs and supply reliability of feedstocks, energy consumption, and byproducts cleanup/disposal, it is still economically unfeasible to construct and operate a profitable commercial-scale biorefinery. Integration of microbial biomass within an established di...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - October 15, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research

Prospects and challenges for chemical process synthesis with P-graph
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Volume 26Author(s): Ferenc Friedler, Kathleen B Aviso, Botond Bertok, Dominic CY Foo, Raymond R TanThe P-graph framework was developed to solve Process Network Synthesis (PNS) problems in plant design. It provides a powerful engineering toolbox based on the constituent Maximal Structure Generation (MSG), Solution Structure Generation (SSG) and Accelerated Branch-and-Bound (ABB) algorithms. During the four decades of its development, the P-graph framework has proven to be capable of solving various engineering applications framed as PNS problems...
Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering - October 1, 2019 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research