Abstract

Advancing towards a Circular Economy is a key initiative in striving for “zero-waste” production processes. In the bio-based production industry, resource recovery units can achieve this “zero-waste” production objective by recovering valuable materials from waste which is both economically lucrative and technologically plausible.

However, despite these facts industrial implementation of resource recovery solutions is limited. A key reason for this limited implementation is the lack of coherent methods and tools that can be used to efficiently identify, develop and implement applicable platform technologies in respective industries taking into account the complex Technical, Economic and Societal considerations.

In this talk thermodynamic based flow sheet synthesis and process design for resource-based recovery from bio based processes will first be presented. The following questions will be addressed. Why have simulators not been used in bio based processes? What thermodynamics and unit operations models exist?

Secondly the roles and use of mechanistic models and data driven “big data” analytics for process quality control will be discussed and the following questions considered. What is big data and the internet of things and how can it add value to my operations? Can we derive benefits from fusion of first principles models and machine learning for online monitoring and optimization?