In chemical and allied industries, process design sustainability has gained public concern in academia, industry, government agencies, and social groups. Over the past decade, a variety of sustainability indicators have been introduced, but with various challenges in application. It becomes clear that the industries need urgently practical tools for conducting systematic sustainability assessment on existing processes and/or new designs and, further, for helping derive the most desirable design decisions. This paper presents a systematic, general approach for sustainability assessment and design selection through integrating hard (quantitative) economic and environmental indicators along with soft (qualitative) indicators for social criteria into design activities. The approach contains four modules: a process simulator module, an equipment and inventory acquisition module, a sustainability assessment module, and a decision support module. The modules fully utilize and extend the capabilities of the process simulator Aspen Plus, Aspen Simulation Workbook, and a spreadsheet, where case model development, data acquisition and analysis, team contribution assessment, and decision support are effectively integrated. The efficacy of the introduced approach is illustrated by the example of biodiesel process design, where insightful sustainability analysis and persuasive decision support show its superiority over commonly practiced technoeconomy evaluation approaches.

In the design of chemical/energy production systems, a major challenge is how to quantify the sustainability of the systems. Concerns on economic return and environmental impacts have been well received by researchers and practitioners. However, the irreversibility of the process has not been taken into consideration yet. Based on the first and second laws of thermodynamics, exergy analysis allows accounting for irreversibility in the process and provides a detailed mechanism for tracking the transformation of energy and chemicals. Sustainability assessment in the societal dimension is mostly a “soft” activity, as the aspects to be considered and the method of evaluation are frequently subjective. How to assess the societal impact of a process in the early design stage remains as a challenging issue. This paper will present a sustainability assessment method incorporating economic, environmental, efficiency, and societal concerns. The efficiency assessment is conducted through exergy analysis, while the societal concerns are measured by an enhanced inherent safety index method. In conjunction with a multicriteria decision-analysis method, this methodology will provide critical guidance to the designers. The efficacy of this methodology will be demonstrated through a case study on biodiesel production processes. The results show that the new heterogeneous catalyst process performs better than the traditional homogeneous process in every dimension.

Technology‐based sustainability enhancement is a key approach for industrial sustainability realization. However, identification of effective technologies for any industrial system could be very challenging. If the available data and information about the industrial system and technologies are incomplete, imprecise, and uncertain, then technology identification could be very difficult. In this article, the authors introduce a simple, yet systematic interval‐parameter‐based methodology for identifying quickly superior solutions under uncertainty for sustainability performance improvement. The methodology is general enough for the study of sustainability enhancement problems of any size and scope. A case study on sustainable development of biodiesel manufacturing demonstrates methodological efficacy. © 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 58: 1841–1852, 2012

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