GREENSCOPE tool

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from West Virginia University and DOE through award DE-FE0012451. The authors also thank Matthew Steinheimer and Zachary Chow (WVU undergraduate students) for the useful discussions on the GREENSCOPE tool and the fermentation process model. 

As mentioned previously the studied fermentation process to produce ethanol presents challenges in its process dynamics that exhibit oscillatory behavior, which affect process productivity and sustainabhity. To address these challenges, this section introduces a new sustainable process control framework that combines the biomimetic control strategy detailed earlier and the GREENSCOPE sustainabihty assessment tool. In this case study, the controlled variable is the concentration of product, Cp (see objective function defined earlier), and the dilution rate, Djn, is chosen as the manipulated variable. GREENSCOPE is employed to evaluate the sustainability performance of the system in open-loop and closed-loop operations. The obtained GITEENSCOPE indicator scores provide information on whether the implementation of the biomimetic controller for the fermentation process enables a more efficient and sustainable process operation. 

Dr. Ruiz-Mercado is currently leading and developing research projects in areas of sustainable development. He is a coinventor and developer of the GREENSCOPE process sustainability methodology and tool. In addition he has a pubhshed record of contributions in research areas such as sustainable product and process design, energy efficient multicomponent distillation, reactive separation processes, sustainabUity evaluation, and life cycle approaches. 

A novel aspect of the GREENSCOPE methodology and tool is that each indicator is placed on a sustainability scale enclosed by scenarios representing the best target (100% of snstainability) and the worst case (0% of snstainability). This sustainability scale allows the transformation of any indicator score to a dimensionless form nsing... 

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