Development of a Tool for Socially Sustainable Process Design

The concept of sustainable design has emerged as a new paradigm. Sustainability combines economic, environmental and social aspects of Process design. In our research all the available metrics, tools that are being used for social quantification with good definition, description and calculation methodology is reviewed. Then a new tool is proposed which considers both the inherent safety and occupational health quantification for sustainable process design. The method is tailored for the process research and development stage by including only such chemical properties and process operating conditions which are obtainable at early design stage. The approach is demonstrated for the two alternative processes of DME production and for the base case and optimized case Acrylonitrile production using simulation engine ASPEN PLUS. With the help of the developed standard index scale and the retrofitted SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR the best socially sustainable process design is assessed.