Process synthesis for addressing the sustainable energy systems and environmental issues

Abstract

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).Diminishing petroleum reserves and oscillations of the global petroleum market, together with the influence on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions have accelerated the needs to explore renewable feedstocks and to seek novel sustainable production systems. Process synthesis, the core of process systems engineering, can be predicted to be the powerful tool to construct an environmental-friendly, cost-effective sustainable energy system. Following the brief descriptions of the main methodologies for process synthesis, the present article reviews current activities on the optimal synthesis of biorenewables conversion processes, polygeneration processes, as well as carbon capture processes. Set in the context of exist achievements and future energy and environment requirements, we further elucidate the potential research vistas on optimal synthesis of novel energy systems, specifically, (a) novel biorenewable conversion process; (b) innovative materials-based carbon capture process; (c) solar/wind driven energy conversion system; (d) integrated biorenewable conversion process for the production of chemicals. Finally, challenges about the above aspects are concisely discussed. V V C 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 00: 000-000, 2012 Keywords: optimal synthesis, biomass conversion process, carbon capture process, polygeneration process, economically viable, environmentally benign IntroductionSince the beginning of last century, fuels and chemicals for our daily requirements have been mainly derived from fossil carbon-based sources (i.e., petroleum, coal, and natural gas), and these fossil fuels will continue to constitute the backbone of current energy resource in the foreseeable future.1 However, the growth of the worldwide population will eventually exhaust the world's supplies of easily exploitable fossil carbon-based sources. Moreover, green house gas (GHG) emissions, especially CO2 emissions associated with the use of fossil carbon-based fuels have been linked to global climate changes such as ice melting at the poles and rising of ocean levels. The above issues are presently driving the whole society to seek renewable sources for replacing coal, natural gas, and petroleum and to develop the innovative and sustainable technologies for the production of energy, fuels and chemicals.From Figure 1 which shows the trends on the United States and World energy demand contributions, it can be easily found that the account of renewable sources will increase largely in the next two decades. Plenty of interlinked research activities for the sustainable technology development have been the main focus of the worldwide research. Generally, these activities depicted by Figure 2 include: the increased utilization of renewables such as wind/biomass/solar energy, 2 the hydrogen economy, 3 and CO2 capture/sequestration. 4,5 Accordingly, various routes for the production of energy, transportation fuels and chemicals with high effic...

A perspective on process synthesis: Challenges and prospects

“…However, the author refers the interested reader to a selected subset of excellent reviews and perspective papers on: reactor and reactor-separator network synthesis focusing on attainable region construction (Feinberg, 2002), synthesis of heat integration networks (Furman and Sahinidis, 2004;Morar and Agachi, 2010), water network synthesis (Jez˙ owski, 2010), distillation-based separation sequence synthesis (Skiborowski et al, 2013), and general process synthesis approaches focusing on their substantial potential for synthesis of sustainable and environmentally-friendly processes for energy and chemicals production (Grossmann and Guillén-Gosálbez, 2010;Yuan and Chen, 2012;Yuan et al, 2013).…”

Integration of wind, solar and biomass over a year for the constant production of CH4 from CO2 and water

“…Most of the sustainable sources of energy, namely biomass, wind and solar, present variable availability with time, seasonality and daylong variability, and location, which results in the need for storage systems, supplementary sources of energy or a combination of sources to maintain a certain production capacity and/or to meet the demand. Weekman (2010) and Yuan and Chen (2012) presented overviews regarding the possibilities of technology integration as a perspective for the future combination of different energy sources. However, the availability of renewable sources is inversely correlated.…”

Multi-objective optimization of heat exchanger networks based on analysis of minimum temperature difference and accumulated CO2 emissions

“…Generally, the HENs design problem is formulated as a SOO problem aiming to minimize the total annual cost [2,3]. However, environmental concerns are nowadays becoming a priority, mainly due to the growing prominence of environmental degradation [4][5][6].…”