Letitia TOMA is a PhD student within the Molecular Simulation Engineering Laboratory (MOSE), a research group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Trieste. Maurizio FERMEGLIA represents MOSE within CO-LaN and supervises Letitia’s work together with Gennaro LONGO of the International Centre for Science and High Technology, ICS-UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization).
Letitia stresses out that the environmental impact of chemical processes and of their products is an important issue of our days. This complex topic equally includes old and new processes.
The presentation describes a framework, which can be applied in the design stages of a chemical process, for the evaluation of environmental impact. A key point of the framework is represented by the implementation of impact balance equations as a CAPE OPEN Unit Operation. The CAPE-OPEN module can be inserted in the process flowsheet on the input streams, output streams and waste streams of the process as any other unit operation. The environmental impact is calculated using the results of the process simulation and toxicological data. Details regarding the development of the module are presented.
Beside the CAPE-OPEN module, the framework contains also a toxicological database and a set of software modules for the final calculation of the environmental indexes.
The procedure was tested using two process simulators: PRO/II and Aspen Plus. Representative examples are presented in order to validate the methodology.