Bridging sustainability and intensified flow processing within process design for sustainable future factories

Abstract

A holistic, life cycle based evaluation approach was followed within the European collaborative project CoPIRIDE, in order to provide multi-criteria decision support for environmentally benign and cost efficient process design strategies in front of a scale-up of newly developed concepts. The approach is presented by means of three case studies, dealing on the one hand with different catalyst plate reuse options, and on the other hand with two process concepts for intensified processing of natural feedstocks by means of epoxidation and transesterification reactions. Key criteria for future sustainable production processes could be identified prior to the transfer of the experimental flow chemistry results to pilot scale processing.

Keywords

• decision support
• eco-efficiency
• life cycle assessment
• life cycle costing
• process intensification