Current consumption and production patterns are unsustainable and will very likely exceed the planetary boundaries if no actions are undertaken. To avoid this scenario and remain competitive in the global market, companies need to invest in new production schemes and/or retrofit actions that will make them more efficient (and ultimately sustainable) through the minimisation of energy, water and materials use along with reductions in emissions and waste. This requires measured approaches towards sustainable manufacturing that consider operations and behaviours alongside technological developments related to efficient usage of energy, material and water resources.
This talk will present recent methodological advances and applications of mathematical programming tools coupled with life cycle assessment (LCA) principles for the development of sustainable processes. The first part of the lecture will provide a motivation for the optimisation of sustainable processes, a formal definition of the problem of interest and an overview of the advantages and limitations of the strategies proposed so far in the literature. The second part will describe in detail a rigorous framework for the development of more sustainable processes that integrates LCA principles with multi-objective optimisation.
The advantages of this approach will be illustrated through several examples, including: the design and planning of supply chains of different sectors (e.g. biofuels production, hydrogen for vehicle use and petrochemicals); the multi-objective optimisation of industrial networks; the superstructure optimisation of chemical and bioprocesses; the design of more efficient buildings; and the optimisation of macroeconomic policies considering environmental pressures embodied in international trade, among others.
The webinar is open to people in industry and academia who wish to be aware of the most recent developments in the area of systematic decision-support tools for sustainable engineering. It is free of charge and open to all.
Biography
Dr Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez is an expert in the development of computer-aided tools applied to sustainable engineering. He completed his MEng degree in Chemical Engineering at Universidad de Murcia in Spain, then received his PhD from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in 2005. He spent two years at Carnegie Mellon University before joining Universitat Rovira Virgili in 2008 first as an Assistant Professor and then as an Associate Professor. In 2014 he joined the University of Manchester where he led the Computer Aided Process Engineering Lab (CAPE-Lab), and in 2016 he moved to Imperial College London where he currently works as Reader in Process Systems Engineering. To date he has graduated 14 PhD students, published around 100 refereed papers (~2500 citations), and co-ordinated more than 20 research projects in the areas of sustainable engineering, life cycle assessment and multi-objective optimisation of chemical processes.
Gonzalo has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the Top National Student Award in Chemical Engineering (highest Spanish GPA 1996–2001), the Top Doctoral Student Award at UPC, the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award (Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering).
Further information
This webinar is organised by IChemE’s Computer Aided Process Engineering, and Sustainability Special Interest Groups. Further information can be found on the website: http://www.icheme.org/cape-guillen-gosalbez
(Image designed by Freepik.)