Sustainable Process Engineering

This book introduces chemical engineering students to key concepts, strategies, and evaluation methods in sustainable process engineering. The book is intended to supplement chemical engineering texts in fundamentals and design, rather than replace them.

The key objectives of the book are to widen system boundaries beyond a process plant to include utility supplies, interconnected plants, wider industry sectors and entire product life cycles; identify waste and its sources in process and utility systems and adopt waste minimization strategies; broaden evaluation to include technical, economic, safety, environmental, social and sustainability criteria and to integrate the assessments; and broaden the engineering horizon to incorporate planning, development, design, and operations.

The book is structured in four parts to explore the following:

1. The progressive response by legislators and professionals to perceived environmental damage and the concepts of sustainability, cleaner production, and industrial ecology
2. Waste minimization strategies for reactors and separators and wider process and utility systems
3. Environmental, safety, economic, and sustainability assessments
4. Guidelines for implementing sustainable process engineering in planning, project development, design, and operations

Case examples are integrated with chapter topics throughout, and defined problems that reflect current industry challenges are provided. Contexts include electricity generation, waste sulfuric acid minimization, petroleum fuel desulfurization, and byproduct hydrogen utilization.