Limited availability of natural resources and high raw material cost, accompanied by growing social and environmental concerns, urge the engineers to incorporate sustainability issues into the design of new chemical process and the retrofit of traditional process.   Yet due to the multi-dimensional nature of sustainability, a structured sustainability assessment tool is needed to serve as the basis for any process design, analysis, improvement and decision making. This seminar presents a sequential approach from reaction pathway selection to process design in light of sustainability. At the early design stage, the sustainability performance of different potential reaction pathways is evaluated, which can help the designers improve the screening efficiency by eliminating inferior reaction alternative systematically, thus reduce the complexity and labor in the following detailed process design stage. The sustainability of each reaction pathway is assessed in terms of possible profit, driving force of the pathway, inherent safety index, environment analysis, efficiency, reaction selectivity and conversion, respectively. Then during the process design stage, the sustainability of each process is evaluated to assist sustainable design by incorporating economic, environmental, societal, and efficiency concerns.

Root cause analysis is a very useful tool to identify the fundamental cause of a specified problem. The combination of the presented sustainability assessment approach and root cause analysis can help the designers screen different reaction routes and identify opportunities for sustainability enhancement. The efficacy of this approach is illustrated via several case studies.

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Helen H. Lou is a Professor in the Dan F. Smith Department of Chemical Engineering at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas. She holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hang Zhou, China (1993). She received the following degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI: an M.S. in Chemical Engineering (1998), an M.A.in Computer Science (2001) and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (2001). Her major research interests include Sustainable Engineering and Process Systems Engineering. Professor Lou has extensive leadership experience in AIChE Process Development Division and Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF). She is a Board Member of the Gulf Coast Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.