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Sustainable chemical processes should be designed to combine the technological advantages and progress with lower safety risks and minimization of environmental impact such as, for example, reduction of raw materials, energy and water consumption, and avoidance of hazardous waste and pollution with toxic chemical agents. A number of novel eco-friendly chemical technologies have been developed in the recent decades with the help of the eco-innovations approaches and methods such as Life Cycle Analysis, Green Process Engineering, Process Intensification, Process Design for Sustainability, and others. An emerging approach to the sustainable process design in process engineering builds on the innovative solutions inspired from nature. However, the implementation of the eco-friendly technologies often faces secondary ecological problems. The study postulates that the eco-inventive principles identified in natural systems allow to avoid secondary eco-problems and proposes to apply these principles for sustainable design in chemical process engineering. The research work critically examines how this approach differs from the biomimetics, as it is commonly used for copying natural systems. The application of nature-inspired eco-design principles is illustrated with an example of a sustainable technology for extraction of nickel from pyrophyllite.
Eco-Feasibility Study and Application of Natural Inventive Principles in Chemical Engineering Design
(2022)
The early stages of the front-end process development are critical for the future success of projects involving new technologies. The application of eco-inventive principles identified in natural systems to the design of chemical processes and equipment allows one to find ways to mitigate or avoid secondary ecological problems such as, for example, higher consumption of raw materials or energy, generation of hazardous waste and pollution of the environment by toxic chemicals. However, before implementing a new technology in a real operational environment, it is necessary to completely investigate its undesirable ecological impact and to evaluate the future viability of this technology. Therefore, the research paper presents a study of ecological feasibility of an innovative process design utilising natural eco-inventive principles and analyses the correlations between applied inventive principles. Such eco-feasibility study can be considered as an important decision gate to determine whether the technology implementation should be moved forward. Furthermore, the study evaluates the practicability of natural inventive principles to the eco-friendly process design and is illustrated with an example of a sustainable technology for nickel extraction from pyrophyllite.
Eco-innovations in chemical processes should be designed to use raw materials, energy and water as efficiently and economically as possible to avoid the generation of hazardous waste and to conserve raw material reserves. Applying inventive principles identified in natural systems to chemical process design can help avoid secondary problems. However, the selection of nature-inspired principles to improve technological or environmental problems is very time-consuming. In addition, it is necessary to match the strongest principles with the problems to be solved. Therefore, the research paper proposes a classification and assignment of nature-inspired inventive principles to eco-parameters, eco-engineering contradictions and eco-innovation domains, taking into account environmental, technological and economic requirements. This classification will help to identify suitable principles quickly and also to realize rapid innovation. In addition, to validate the proposed classification approach, the study is illustrated with the application of nature-inspired invention principles for the development of a sustainable process design for the extraction of high-purity silicon dioxide from pyrophyllite ores. Finally, the paper defines a future research agenda in the field of nature-inspired eco-engineering in the context of AI-assisted invention and innovation.