COMPARATIVE SUSTAINABILITY STUDY BETWEEN THE TRADITIONAL BATCH AND THE SUPERCRITICAL CONTINUOUS SUNFLOWER OIL HYDROGENATION PROCESSES

摘要

Supercritical fluids are increasingly considered in the processing of some natural products, in the food, biotechnological, in the fragances, and fine chemical industries [1]. In these processes the supercritical fluid can be easily recovered from the reactor and recycled with minimal impact on the environment, very little energy expenditure, and without residual contamination in the product. Recently, an interesting account of the use of SCF in clean catalytic hydrogenation reactions has been published [2].Our purpose in this work is to evaluate the sustainability consequences that would involve the substitution of one part (1/6) of a discontinuous plant production for a supercritical continuous plant of the same output. We start with a traditional batch plant with a total capacity of about 76500 tonnes per year. The new supercritical plant will have a similar capacity in order to enable us to compare the total amounts of raw materials, water and energy consumed, as well as the incidences in toxicity, pollution and safety from both studied processes. To sum up, our main purpose is to evaluate the economical and ecological viability of this change from the results obtained, including the payback period.