Sustainable process development

Keywords Autarkic energy supply, Biopolymers, Integrated production lines. Sugar cane industry. Sustainable process development... 

Tunca C, Ramachandran PA, Dudukovic MP Role of chemical reaction engineering in sustainable process development. In Abraham MA, editor Sustainability science and engineering defining principles, San Diego, CA, 2006, Elsevier. 

Chemical processes will in the future need to be designed as part of a sustainable industrial development which retains the capacity of ecosystems to support industrial activity and life. This book therefore places a high emphasis on waste minimization and energy efficiency in the context of good economic performance and good health and safety practices. 

Addressing the second question first leads to a critical constraint when thinking about new, more sustainable, technological developments, that is, the universal applicability of the laws of thermodynamics to aU physical, chemical and biological processes. A central and inescapable fact is the inevitability of waste formation. One statement of the second law of thermodynamics says that heat cannot be converted completely into work. Or, in other words, the energy output of work is always less than the energy transformed to accomplish it. A consequence of this is that, even in principle, it is impossible for any real process to proceed without the generation of some sort of waste. 

In the chloride process, developed in about 1960, the titanium in the ore is converted to titanium(IV) chloride by heating it to 800 °C with chlorine in the presence of carbon, which combines with the released oxygen. The purified chloride is then oxidised to titanium dioxide at 1000 °C and the chlorine formed is recycled. Technical problems arise because the oxidation of titanium(IV) chloride is not sufficiently exothermic to make the reaction self-sustaining but these can be overcome by pre-heating the reactants and by burning carbon monoxide in the reactor to raise the temperature. By careful control of the conditions, it is possible to produce pure rutile particles of a mean size of 200 nm. 

Most of the biofuel production processes developed to date are immature and have never been implemented on an indnstrial scale. Projections of the amount of biofuel depend on the development of the bioeconomy and society. Biofuels are generally considered as offering many priorities, inclnding sustainability, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, regional development, social structure and agriculture, security of supply (Reijnders, 2006). 

I 70 The Development of an Environmentally Sustainable Process for Radafaxine Table 10.4 Life cycle metrics. 

---