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In the pharma and fine chemical industries, the development of continuous flow technologies is a process intensification step of primary importance towards the manufacturing of high-quality products, while reducing the environmental impact and cost of production. The sustainability and profitability of a process can be measured through life cycle Assessment and cost evaluation. However, when applied to emerging technologies, these need to be performed at different stages of the process development in order to limit the uncertainties arising from the scale-up, and hence providing high-fidelity projections of environmental impacts and costs at larger scales. The output of the assessment can in fact vary significantly depending on the maturity of the technology and this translates into having different results at commercial scale compared to early estimations. Therefore, in this article, we perform an assessment at two different scales of production, lab and mini-pilot scale, with the aim of quantifying the uncertainties of the assessment related to the scale-up, identifying the hotspots of the system, and hence providing guidelines for the further steps of process development. The subject of the assessment is the continuous flow synthesis of Rufinamide. It is the first time that this synthesis is evaluated at pilot-scale. The results show that low yields in the cycloaddition drastically affect the waste management and the production of precursors, and hence increases environmental impacts and cost of production. This calls for the need of prioritizing the optimization of this synthesis step in order to deploy a green and economically competitive production technology.

Bio-substitute natural gas (or bio-SNG) produced from gasification of waste fuels and subsequent methanation of the product gas could play a crucial role in the decarbonisation of heating and transportation, and could be a vital part of the energy mix in the coming decades. Although the methanation of trace quantities of carbon oxides has been practiced commercially for many years, methanation from syngas poses a more severe problem due to the high and unstable concentrations of reactants in the produced gas. In this work, a low-Ni methanation catalyst was tested in a differential reactor to derive a kinetic model that could determine a practical operating scheme for the first methanation step of a typical bio-SNG process. The model, comprising water gas shift and methanation reactions, along with their reverse reactions, was used for realistic modelling of the methanation process using high quality syngas, obtained from steam-oxygen gasification of wastes and gas plasma conversion, and to better determine the operation conditions in the first reactor of a bio-SNG pilot plant in Swindon (UK). The tests undertaken show that the catalyst was performing as expected using the waste-derived syngas at industrially relevant conditions, when compared to predictions of models derived from works using bottled gases. This gives confidence that the same approach can be used for the detailed design and operation of once through methanation reactor elements and process system configuration for bio-SNG production at larger scale.

Carbon capture and utilisation provide a means to mitigate climate change caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by delaying carbon emissions via temporary storage in goods. This article presents a...

In this study, the environmental impacts of three ibuprofen production routes, namely, the BHC, the Bogdan, and the newly developed enzymatic synthetic routes (modified Bogdan process), are assessed and compared by the application of life cycle assessment (LCA). Based on the data obtained through literature and laboratory-based experiments, a pilot-scale production with a capacity of 500 g/day of ibuprofen was simulated to generate inventory data for the LCA study, using Aspen Plus V11. The wellestablished BHC process was chosen as the benchmark to quantify the operational and environmental benefits of the innovative enzymatic Bogdan flow synthetic process. The comparison highlights the benefit of adopting the modified Bogdan synthesis route via an enzymatic catalyst. Results show that a general reduction of environmental impact is achievable across the whole set of impact categories of the analysis, and the magnitude of such reduction depends on the efficiency of recycling in the production system. Considering a 50% efficiency of recycling, the modified Bogdan system achieves lower environmental impacts in some impact categories like Acidification, Ecotoxicity of freshwater, Human toxicity, Particulate matter, and Resource depletion (mineral, fossils, renewables) while having higher impacts on the rest of the impact categories. Yet, the new process proposed here scores better environmental performances in all of the impact categories when the enzyme recycling is close to 100%, which is promising for future technology development.

This study investigates on the environmental impact of an intensified technology for the manufacturing of Zeolite A, one of the largest zeolites employed worldwide by volume and value. The technology under consideration is an oscillatory continuousflow synthesis, developed industrially by Arkema, and currently at pilot-scale. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used in this work to measure the sustainability of this emerging technology in an anticipatory fashion, before its full deployment, with the aim of driving the process development toward the minimization of the environmental footprint.The assessment explores the full life-cycle of the production system and comprises comparative analysis, scenario analysis, and a hotspot analysis. Finally, the continuousflow technology is benchmarked against the environmental impact of a conventional batch production of zeolite A, based on a full-scale commercial plant. The results evidence that significant benefits would stem from shifting from batch to continuous-flow production. The comparative analysis reveals that the extent of the latter advantages depends on the impact category under consideration and directs the next steps of CF system's process development toward pivotal aspects such as the recirculation system to further reduce the system's environmental impacts. Regardless of the chosen production technology, a large share of the total environmental impact hinges on the production of NaOH, a building block of the synthesis, and hence is hardly mitigatable.

Gold nanoparticles and nanoclusters can be used in a variety of sectors in different applications. Research on new synthesis methods and procedures for their integration into products is flourishing with...