Design of Sustainable Products for Bioethanol Manufacture, CO2 Capture and Low-Temperature Energy Recovery Using Mathematical Optimization Techniques

Prof. Antonio Flores Tlacuahuac
Professor

Departamento de Ingenieria Quimica, Universidad Iberoamericana

In this talk we will address the problem of how to design new products for two main purposes: (a) The sustainable separation of the etanol/water azetropic mixture up to high-purity, (b) The capture of CO2 from combustion streams and for the efficient energy recovery from low-temperature processing streams. All these issues share a common factor: The design of a new kind of products for the sustainable and efficient use of new energy sources. We will show that the problem of how to design new products for achieving these aims can be cast as an Optimal Molecular Design Problem, where target design objectives, together with physical, thermodynamic and transport propertis of the designed compound, can be enforced such that performance requirements are met. Moreover, using optimization techniques, the design of the processing system, where the required separation or energy recovery operation takes places, can also be optimized leading to processes with better profit features. We will show some recent results obtained for the optimal molecular design of ionic liquids for high-purity ethanol recovery from cellulosic azeotropic ethanol-water mixtures, for the CO2 recovery from combustion streams and for the design of new organic compounds for energy capture from low temperature processing streams.