I-Corps: Energy Efficient Process Design Alternatives

University Of Rhode Island, Kingston RI

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project centers on new design process software for reducing energy use in chemical manufacturing. Commodity chemicals, plastics, polymers and other materials require large amounts of energy to make and the companies that manufacture these products make up the single largest group of energy consumers in the industrial sector in the U.S. and worldwide. Many opportunities for reducing energy consumption exist within the chemical, biochemical, and pharmaceutical industries, particularly in the area of chemical separations. The innovation has potential to provide customers with new capabilities for retrofitting existing facilities and/or new grass roots designs to reduce energy consumption, reduce operating costs, improve company profits, and simultaneously reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This I-Corps project has at its core novel process design technology that is based on a combination of engineering, geometric, and optimization principles. The design software, and the technology on which it is based, can be used to reliably determine portfolios of feasible, energy efficient designs that meet specific process energy targets and can easily be combined with other methods that address heat exchange and chemical reaction. It allows the user to automatically and systematically explore a wide range of process alternatives, including processes with reaction, separation and recycle, those that involve hybrid separations, and/or process intensification. Unlike other currently available methods for the same task, this new technology guarantees that the resulting designs are feasible. The core technology has been extensively tested on a wide range of benchmark design examples in the open literature.