Economic, Safety and Environmental Multi-Objective Optimisation of Chemical Pathway Selection

Economic, Safety and Environmental Multi-Objective Optimisation of Chemical Pathway Selection

Designing a more sustainable process has become a critical issue with stricter environmental legislation, increasing public concern, repeating plant accidents and escalating environmental problems. Thorough literature review has shown that many researchers have concentrate on implementing either safety or environmental concern into design process. However, only few works have been done on integrating both criteria simultaneously together with economic goal and none is done using multiple indicators. In this paper, a systematic hierarchical framework which focuses on multi-objective optimisation of all three considerations simultaneously using various safety and environmental indexes has been developed. Following the proposed framework, Spreadsheet Assessment Preliminary Analysis (SAPA) is developed to assist process designer in selecting, evaluating and optimising process alternatives available simultaneously during preliminary design stage easily and quickly. Both the framework and SAPA is illustrated by using hydrogen cyanide (HCN) production case study. The developed tool is able to be exteded to different type of process plant.