Sustainable process design & analysis of hybrid separations

Sustainable chemical processing and energy-carbon dioxide management: Review of challenges and opportunities

“…Additionally, research is also focused on improvisation of energy technologies through innovative and sustainable designs to substantially reduce the CO 2 emissions (EIA, 2015;Tula, et al 2017). For example, a global increase of 7% in the efficiency of coal-fired power plants will reduce the global carbon dioxide emissions by 1.7 billion tons per year (World Energy Resource, 2016).…”

“…The main questions, however, are when such hybrid schemes should be applied, what characteristics the separation problem should have, what the configuration should be and how much improvement could be expected? Tula et al (2017) recently proposed a general method for synthesis-design of hybrid distillationmembrane based separation schemes taking into account the mixture to be separated, the difficulties of using only distillation or membrane-based operations to achieve the desired separation, the optimal distillation-membrane based hybrid scheme, the potential for energy saving without compromising the product specifications, and the capital and operating costs. For several test cases, Tula et al (2017) showed substantial decreases in energy consumptions while matching the same product purity specifications.…”

“…In this paper, the method of Tula et al (2017) is extended to a series of aqueous separations (water plus a second compound that may or may not form azeotrope with water.). The results for methanol-water separation are given in Table 5.…”

“…These types of separations are particularly interesting when the water needs to be removed to obtain a high purity product. Clearly, as shown by Tula et al (2017), separation by distillation is not very energy efficient after certain product purity. Therefore, a hybrid scheme where distillation is performed until a cut-off point and then another separation technique (for example, membrane) that can perform the remaining separation at low energy consumption is employed.…”

“… improvement of process efficiencies to reduce energy consumption (Duflou, et al 2012;Tula, et al 2017);  utilization of alternative energy sources (e.g., solar energy, wind power and geothermal) and renewable (e.g., biomass and biofuel) as opposed to currently dominant fossil fuel based sources (Karakosta, et al 2013;Hussain, et al 2017);  application of carbon dioxide capture, sequestration & utilization (CCS & U) technologies (Cuellar-Franca and Azapagic, 2015;Dowell, et al 2017).…”