Development of Sustainability Evaluator Interface to Evaluate Environmental, Economic and Social Indices of Chemical Processes

Abstract

Process design engineers have to consider a lot of constraints while designing chemical processes. Engineers have to deal with not only process design and product development details, but also need to consider environmental regulations, social impacts and economic benefits. Sustainable process design should simultaneously maximize the economic and social benefits of the process and minimize adverse impact on the environment. The main challenge engineers must address is, how economic, environmental and social aspects of the chemical process can be incorporated into early stages of process design. So process designers require a well-defined, robust and efficient tool to calculate the sustainability index in order to design sustainable chemical processes. In this work, the SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR tool developed by Shadiya and High (2010) is modified and a novel Sustainability Evaluator Interface is developed using Excel VBA to enable engineers to determine sustainability index more effectively. Modified sustainability evaluator allows engineers to customize potency factors of chemicals involved in the process and also weight factors of different index besides built in values to obtain more effective results. The sustainability of the manufacturing process of Lactic Acid has been evaluated using the modified SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR and the results was compared with results obtained using previous SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR for validation. Details working procedure of the modified SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR tool results, reports and graphs generated to determine sustainability of lactic acid process using this SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR tool are also described in this work.