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Dr. Rafiqul Gani

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER PSE FOR SPEED COMPANY


Energy efficient sustainable process alternatives: How to find them?

In a world with increasing population and finite natural resources that are not uniformly distributed, the challenge for modern society is to satisfy the demands for new and improved products and their sustainable manufacturing [1]. With data showing increased emissions of greenhouse gases resulting in rapid rise of earth’s temperature and other negative developments, urgent action is necessary to tackle the energy-water-environment-health-food nexus through sustainable alternatives [2]. Improvements in orders of magnitude are needed in technologies currently being employed in the conversion of resources to products that sustain modern society. It is, however, questionable if the currently available technologies and/or methods and associated tools for their development are able to deliver the needed improvements. Opportunities therefore exist for chemical engineering and related disciplines to deliver truly innovative solutions by managing this complexity. The lecture will highlight the opportunities within chemical engineering and related disciplines to tackle the challenges through the application of a new class of systematic methods and associated computer-aided tools, where integration of ideas-disciplines, hybrid model-data analytics, design techniques based on the ‘define-targets and match-targets” paradigm, and a systematic multi-scale analysis-solution approach play important roles [3]. The objective is to simultaneously reduce energy consumption, costs as well as wastes for selected processes, leading to the achievement of the common goals of decarbonization, circular economy and sustainability. Results from case studies illustrating the main concepts will be presented.