Abstract
Waste and emissions cause major challenges in chemical plants due to their environmental impact, high cost of treatment, regulatory penalties, disposal fees, and potential loss of process efficiency. Current process synthesis methods do not consider those aspects from the process synthesis and design level. This work presents a methodology that provides a more comprehensive reaction route analysis for the process synthesis, focusing on the screening of alternative production pathways, derived from known reaction sequences, for acrylic acid synthesis, integrating economic and environmental metrics using the P-graph tool. The study demonstrates the benefits of sustainable process synthesis, highlighting how P-graph enables the rigorous evaluation and selection of the most energy-efficient and low-emission pathways as well as the sub-optimal pathways. The proposed methodology is applied to the synthesis and optimization of an acrylic acid production process, integrating economic and environmental metrics within a P-graph superstructure to evaluate multiple production pathways. The results emphasize the importance of incorporating economic and environmental factors into process design for more accurate analysis, and how P-graph can support sustainable decision-making in industrial settings.
