Incorporating sustainability in the early design stage is instrumental for the development of new energy production systems.  This paper presents a decision tree incorporating a sustainability evaluation framework ranging from reaction pathway selection to process design.At the very early stage, the sustainability performance of different potential reaction pathways is evaluated in order to eliminate inferior reaction alternatives systematically, thus reduce the complexity and labor in the following process development stage. Then the sustainability of each process design is evaluated in multiple dimensions, followed by a root-cause analysis to identify the major causes that affect its sustainability.  Appropriate actions can be taken for sustainability improvement after the complex relationships are revealed.This decision-making framework can help the designers to screen different reaction routes and process designs quickly, and identify the most important improvement opportunity. The efficacy of this approach is illustrated via several case studies.

Sustainability assessment and root cause analysis of energy production systems abstract

245th National Meeting (2013)

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