Evaluating Process Sustainability Using Flowsheet Monitoring

Environmental metric software can be used to evaluate the sustainability of a chemical based on data from the chemical process that is used to manufacture it. One problem in developing environmental metric software is that chemical process simulation packages typically do not make process flow data available via a mechanism that can be readily accessed by other software packages. While there have been past attempts to develop software that performs environmental sustainability calculations using process simulators, there is no standardized approach for obtaining the process information required to calculate metrics. This paper proposes a standardized mechanism for obtaining process information directly from a process simulation using a strongly integrated interface set, called flowsheet monitoring. The flowsheet monitoring interface provides read-only access to the thermodynamics, unit operations and streams within the process model, and can be used to obtain the material flow data directly from the simulation. This material flow data can then be used to calculate process-based environmental metrics.