A material-centric methodology for developing inherently safer environmentally benign processes
Stringent safety and environmental regulations, and competition have challenged the chemical process industries to bring products to market at low lifecycle costs without compromising on safety and environmental standards. This has led the designers to consider inherent safety and waste minimization principles at the early stages of design. Tools and methods are available for developing inherently safer process and carrying out waste minimization analysis individually without taking into account the close coupling between them. This results in an incomplete and inaccurate analysis. In this paper, we present a systematic methodology for the integrated safety and waste minimization analysis during process design. Safety issues are characterized by unintended effects of materials and waste issues by release of material to the environment. The material-centric view thus brings out the similarities between the source of safety and pollution issues and the strategies necessary for their improvement. It also provides a common framework to identify synergies and tradeoffs among the alternatives generated thus enhancing the decision-making during design process. The integrated methodology is implemented as an intelligent decision support system that can help design inherently safe and environmentally benign chemical processes. The integrated methodology and its implementation are discussed and illustrated on an industrial process involving acrylic acid production process. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
safety process design waste-minimization knowledge-based system acrylic acid process