Social, Safety, and Sustainable Process Selection Approach for On-Purpose Propylene Production

Abstract

A systematic method for process selection is proposed by using accurate and reliable metrics that consider environmental, safety, and social impacts. This method provides measures in the form of three stages. The high-level process surveying and screening stage focuses on accumulating and preliminarily evaluating numerous process routes for the desired project. The targeted process selection stage ranks the designs by using metrics and reducing the number of designs considered for detailed analysis. Lastly, the Safety and Sustainability Weighted Return on Investment Metric (SASWROIM) integrates the information for decision-making before proceeding to the detailed analysis. To illustrate the approach, case studies on social indicators for process selection and on-purpose propylene production are considered.