Advancing Sustainable Circular Economy through Process Systems – Engineering Approaches

According to the recent report of National Academies, among the global challenges that would drive the future of chemical engineering are the decarbonization of energy systems, finding sustainable solutions for water, food and air quality, reducing the cost of medicine and work on resource utilization towards circular economy.
Those concerns motivate the research on replacing oil-based feedstocks with biomass raw material for chemical and fuel production. Various technologies have been developed, scaled up, and commercialized over the years. However, most biomass conversion technologies are optimized to selectively convert a specific feedstock component (e.g., cellulose, hemicellulose, or lignin) while the rest becomes the waste stream. Hence, the integrated biorefinery is proposed to combine different conversion technologies and fully utilize all biomass components. Our work on integrating different technologies based on superstructure optimization framework of the biorefinery including the consideration of uncertainty would be covered in this talk.
Plastic waste is among the biggest global environmental issues due to the massive greenhouse gas emissions associated with its production and the lack of proper end-of-life management. Our group is working on evaluating and integrating new technologies in terms of economic viability using technoeconomic analysis and environmental footprint using Life Cycle Assessment approaches. This presentation will address the assessment of technologies and emphasize the necessity for a comprehensive integrated solution, taking into account plastic collection and optimizing the supply chain for all essential components. Issues related to how policies are critical and the integration of social metrics in the optimization of decision making would be discussed.

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Marianthi Ierapetritou is the Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Delaware. Prior to that she has been a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. During the last year at Rutgers University, she led the efforts of the university advancing the careers in STEM for women at Rutgers as an Associate Vice President of the University.
Dr. Ierapetritou’s research focuses on the following areas: 1) process operations; (2) design and synthesis of flexible production systems with emphasis on pharmaceutical manufacturing; 3) energy and sustainability process modeling and operations; and 4) modeling of biopharmaceutical production. Her research is supported by several federal (FDA, NIH, NSF, ONR, NASA, DOE) and industrial (BMS, J&J, GSK, PSE, Bosch, Eli Lilly) grants.
Among her accomplishments are the 2022 AICHE Excellence in Process Development Research Award, the appointment as the Gore Centennial Chair Professor in 2019, the promotion to distinguished professor at Rutgers University in 2017, the 2016 Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division Award in Computing in Chemical Engineering which is the highest distinction in the Systems area of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the Award of Division of Particulate Preparations and Design (PPD) of The Society of Powder Technology, Japan; the Outstanding Faculty Award at Rutgers; the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Award for Scholarly Excellence; and the prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has served as a Consultant to the FDA under the Advisory Committee for Pharmaceutical Science and Clinical Pharmacology, elected as a fellow of AICHE and as a Director in the board of AIChE. She has more than 300 publications and has been an invited speaker to numerous national and international conferences.
Dr. Ierapetritou obtained her BS from The National Technical University in Athens, Greece, her PhD from Imperial College (London, UK) in 1995 and subsequently completed her post-doctoral research at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ).