During this years funding cycle CenCITT has supported 12 projects from its base grant. These projects cover a broad range of pollution prevention topics represented in each of CenCITT's Focus Areas. The research activities are consistent with the recommendations of the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) and include:
A focused, results-oriented agenda for the Clean Process Advisory System Focus Area, targeted toward outreach and completion of developing design tools.
A targeted scope for the Clean Reaction Technologies Focus Area including partial oxidation of methane to methanol, rational design of catalytic reactions, and heuristics for separative reactor design and selection.
A maturing Focus Area in Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing which is investigating product disassembly and waste stream prediction.
Support for the Efficient Materials Utilization Focus Area in the development of biodegradable plastics manufactured from waste lignin.
In addition to projects funded through the base-grant, CenCITT participates in a growing number of parallel activities. These activities are consistently targeted toward addressing the general objective of "developing and promoting tools and technologies for sustainability". Through this diversification, CenCITT can leverage base grant resources with other public and private funding sources to reach objectives that would not otherwise be possible.
Examples of these activities include:
These activities and other developing initiatives complement the efforts under CenCITT's base grant. Together, they are all part of the mosaic of clean technology that CenCITT is creating through its national leadership in the development and promotion of clean technologies and pollution prevention information systems.
The figure below presents a design line that is followed in translating societal statements of need into products and services that address those needs. CenCITT's research in each of the four Focus Areas continues to address issues along this line while maintaining primary focus on the front-end where the degrees of freedom and subsequent pollution prevention dividends are the greatest.
For example, projects under the Clean Process Advisory System Focus Area strongly target the stages of process selection and conceptual design by developing design tools that quickly identify and rank technology and design options. These tools will ultimately be able to rank options on the basis of economics, environmental impact, and worker and consumer safety.
Projects in the Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing (ECM) Focus Area travel across the design line and cover the range from statement of need through product recycle. The research underway in the area of cutting fluids addresses the statement of need: "are cutting fluids necessary for a given operation?". In contrast, the ECM research in disassembly recognizes that an industrial society requires consumer products that are currently being manufactured. Efficient and economical disassembly approaches will increase the amount of material that can be recycled from these products, thereby reducing the burden on natural resources and landfill space.
Similarly, research in the Efficient Materials Utilization Focus Area recognizes that there are currently bulk streams of waste material that could be manufactured into consumer products. Research in biodegradable lignin based plastics addresses the issues of waste reuse and product environmental impact. By both making use of a voluminous waste stream and generating a biodegradable product there are significant potential impacts in reducing stress on waste processing and storage facilities.
Research in the Clean Reaction Technologies Focus Area has the strongest technology component and will result in the development of additional technologies or processes (e.g. catalysts and reactors) that will provide a designer with more environmentally friendly options at the process selection stage.
Through this approach of addressing needs along the entire design line, CenCITT researchers are working to solve the problems of the present and the future. By identifying product recycle and reuse opportunities near the end of the design line, they are reducing the burden of existing processes, products, and technologies on the environment. By developing new technologies and decision-making tools at the beginning of the design line, they are helping to ensure that the products, processes, and technologies of the future will be more environmentally benign.
A more detailed description of each focus area is presented below. Please see the Research Project Descriptions section of this report for summaries of each current CenCITT project.
Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing
The Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing (ECM) Focus Area develops tools and methods that can characterize the environmental impact of product designs. With environmental information at their fingertips, designers may modify the design to reduce environmental impact while maintaining other product-related constraints. This Focus Area seeks to identify product design strategies that are environmentally benign (or nearly so) and therefore prevent/reduce pollution.
ECM is directed at the environmental issues surrounding the life cycle of discrete products. The figure on the next page has frequently been used to illustrate the life cycle for products such as automobiles, lawn mowers, blenders, and washing machines. The cycle begins with material extraction from nature, and includes the material processing, manufacture, use, and post-use handling of a product. Movement through the life cycle (clockwise motion) has costs (direct and societal) and energy consumption associated with it. The life cycle suggests that even the post-use handling of a product (including demanufacturing, treatment, and disposal) adds to the life cycle costs and energy consumption. The figure also indicates that in addition to the product disposal option, demanufacturing also considers reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling. These options are preferred over disposal since they increase the useful life of the product. It may also be noted that the inner loops are preferred over the outer loops.
In responding to the needs of customers, product designers must carefully consider the life cycle depicted above. A variety of design-related decisions control the ability of the product to satisfy form, fit, function, cost constraints, production schedules, and environmental impact. These include:
While designers have become facile at making many of these decisions, they have little experience in terms of environment-driven metrics. This Focus Area seeks to remedy this deficiency.
The Clean Reaction Technologies Focus Area (CReaTe) within CenCITT has been established to integrate concepts at different scales for the purpose of industrially sustainable pollution prevention. The CReaTe Focus Area consists of research projects involving:
CenCITT is collaborating with several industrial and governmental partners on the development of experimental and theoretical methods for the rational design of commercially competitive and less polluting catalytic reactions. Researchers within CenCITT have developed the concept of microkinetic analysis to combine the results from physical, chemical, and spectroscopic measurements of a catalytic system to formulate molecular models that provide critical information of catalytic processes. This methodology has proven effective for the development of new highly selective hydrocarbon processing catalysts required for the production of components necessary for clean motor fuels. Furthermore, microkinetic analysis provides a chemical basis for kinetic expressions required in the design and modeling of chemical reactor technologies.
Benign biosynthesis has great potential growth in the selective production of specialty chemicals from renewable carbon sources especially chemicals with chiral centers. Moreover there is a great potential for the interaction between chiral centers which are created from biosynthesis and subsequent chemical synthesis. During this reporting period, no projects in benign biosynthesis were funded. However, CenCITT may fund projects in this area in the next funding cycle.
There are limits to what catalytic chemistry can do. End products from chemical reactions build up and their production ceases. Consequently, CenCITT is developing reactors that separate reactants and products as the reaction proceeds; thereby, greatly improving the conversion of reactants to the desired products. Lastly, tracking the production of chemical feedstocks through the various intermediates allows CenCITT to compare the greenness of various approaches in producing chemical feedstocks and can be used to decide the needs for development of new chemical pathways and catalysts. The feedstock stewardship activity assists in identifying where new catalyst chemistry may be applied as it is discovered.
Efficient Materials Utilization
The Efficient Material Utilization (EMU) Focus Area has the global objective of producing step reductions in pollution generation by focusing on high volume industrial materials currently thought of as wastes. This Focus Area seeks to identify these high volume streams and either eliminate them through process changes and technology development, or develop methods to produce useful products from these wastes.
Examples of past EMU project objectives are: the reuse of foundry wastes, combustion residuals, and the development of a no-VOC inking system for specialty printing. Because combustion residual activities are being supported by other organizations with greater resources, SAC has recently suggested a reduced scope for EMU which does not include combustion residuals. The current scope of EMU includes lignin-based biodegradable plastics which utilize a high volume waste stream (kraft lignins) and produce a useful, biodegradable product.
The Clean Process Advisory System (CPAS) is developing as a system of software and design aids for efficiently delivering information on clean technologies and pollution prevention methodologies to the conceptual process and product designer. The system is meant to address the challenge of incorporating environmental considerations into conceptual process and product design, where the majority of the waste can be reduced in a cost effective manner.
CPAS has been a co-development effort involving CenCITT, the Center for Waste Reduction Technologies (CWRT), and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS). CenCITT holds strategic alliances with CWRT and NCMS which were put in place to facilitate and encourage continued collaboration in the development of CPAS and more broadly in the advancement of clean technologies and information systems. Collaboration is the cornerstone of CPAS development and the developers understand that its continued success depends on the mutual involvement of industry, government, and universities.
While one of the fundamental goals of CPAS is the generation of pollution prevention design tools (e.g. software), it is important to note that CPAS is not just about software. CPAS is about process and product design in general. The CPAS vision is: creating a means for companies to make routine decisions inherently "green", inherently safe, and still cost effective. This requires the linking of a diverse collection of engineering design expertise; operations and construction know-how; and value engineering.
In many ways, CPAS can also be thought of as a technology transfer device for technologies that CenCITT and its partners discover and invent. For example, once a technology is proven, it can be immediately merged into CPAS. CPAS can also be used in the class room for educational purposes and could become an agent of change for the next generation of engineers.
Integrating pollution prevention concepts into the industrial environment requires a culture shift which will result in designers, operators, and managers thinking of opportunities for pollution prevention implementation at all times. This culture shift is currently occurring for a number of reasons from economics, to altruism, to compliance enforcement. CPAS has and will continue to act as a catalyst that continually accelerates this shift.
It is important to stress that CPAS is not intended to be a panacea for any and all green design issues, but rather one component of an overall "Engineering Analysis Environment". The following figure depicts this environment graphically. This conceptual structure allows designers to work with tools they are currently familiar with while supplying additional economic, environmental, and safety information through individual CPAS tools. This framework also allows for the most efficient leveraging with existing and developing initiatives and programs in process and product design.
In the absence of technology transfer, the greatest discoveries and technical achievements have marginal value at best. Therefore, technology transfer continues to be an integral component of CenCITT's program. CenCITT firmly believes that technology transfer is a two-way street whereby the needs and existing capabilities of industry are actively pursued, and technologies and concepts generated are transferred to address those needs. Each member of CenCITT's research program plays a key role in communicating the discoveries and technological advances generated.
The topic of technology transfer has recently begun to be referred to more broadly as "knowledge transfer". This broadening of scope is quite appropriate considering that technology itself is only one component of scientific discoveries. Communication of the knowledge and fundamental understandings that have resulted in and from the technology is commonly more important than the technology itself.
This concept is especially appropriate in the field of pollution prevention where there is a need for both: 1) the development of new technologies for process, material, and energy efficiency, and 2) a change in the culture of those who implement technology to produce consumer goods and services. The notion of "knowledge transfer" recognizes and advances the culture change necessary to move toward a sustainable environment. This process of transferring knowledge in addition to transferring technology has been and continues to be a significant component of CenCITT's outreach efforts.
| ACTIVITY TYPE | NUMBER |
| Refereed Journal Articles | 13 |
| Articles Submitted for Publication | 16 |
| Books, Chapters, or Bound Proceedings | 10 |
| Major Project Reports | 1 |
| Theses/Dissertations | 7 |
| Research Presentations Made | 23 |
| Technology Transfer Meetings and Presentations | 23 |
| Conferences/Meetings Held | 3 |
| TOTAL R&D RESULTS CONVEYANCES | 96 |
During this period, CenCITT researchers and staff have been involved in a number of technology transfer events. Several CenCITT researchers participated in the 1997 ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference. This participation included session chairs in Biosynthesis and Chemical Processing and Modeling, a poster presentation in the rational design of catalytic reactions, and a table top display for the Clean Process Advisory System (CPAS).
A representative from CenCITT also participated in a workshop on the Role of Modeling and Simulation in Environmental Management sponsored by U.S. EPA and DOE. The intent of this workshop was to direct DOE's research programs in the area of modeling and simulation for environmental management. The workgroup on manufacturing and pollution prevention provided several recommendations for the use of modeling and simulation in pollution prevention. Among these recommendations was a call for DOE to evaluate, utilize, and support existing environmental modeling and simulation efforts such as those under development by the CPAS Focus Area.
In June, 1997, CenCITT participated in an Engineering Foundation Conference on Clean Products and Processes. This participation included an invited presentation on Computer-Based Methods for Design of Clean Products and Processes and co-chairing a session on Computer-Based Design Tools.
CenCITT also continues to participate in the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR). NPPR is a national organization consisting primarily of State Technical Assistance Providers (TAPs). These TAPs are instrumental in transferring technological information to small and medium sized businesses for economic and environmental sustainability. CenCITT maintains representation in the Information Technology and Research and Technology Transfer workgroups. This participation offers a conduit for CenCITT to transfer technologies and methodologies related to both information systems (e.g. CPAS) and technologies (e.g. EMU, CReaTe, and ECM) directly to small and medium sized companies throughout the country.
CenCITT also looks forward to increased participation with the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA). During this period, a presentation was made at a CMA Responsible Care Conference, "Delivering on the Promise". With the operation of the Chemical Industry Compliance Assistance Center, CenCITT anticipates a more significant level of collaboration in the areas of compliance assistance and technology development.
CenCITT has held meetings to identify needs and/or collaborative opportunities with: Air Products and Chemicals, Dow Corning, Calgon Carbon Corporation, Chemical Manufacturers Association, OLI Systems Inc., Detroit Edison, Libbey Owens Ford, Whirlpool Corporation, Velsicol Chemical Company, Caterpillar, 3M, Mercury Marine, Chrysler Corporation, IBM, Cleveland-Cliffs, Industrial Piping Inc., and others. Continuing the philosophy that technology transfer is a two-way street, CenCITT continues to pursue venues with industrial consortia, individual companies, government agencies, and other stakeholders.
Quality Assurance/Quality Control
CenCITT's Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) plan is implemented at the project level and is the responsibility of each Project Investigator. The general CenCITT plan is tailored to integrate with the needs, aim, and type of each project. For example, projects which do not include experimental data collection (e.g. modeling, process simulation, industrial needs surveys) will not have an experimental QA/QC plan. QA/QC procedures for projects which include experiments and data collection normally consider the accuracy of results required for the stated intention of the work. For example, a study to examine industrial feasibility of a new technology would normally not require reagent purities as high as those demanded by catalytic reaction product determinations. Screening experiments may not require as many repeat experiments as pure component property measurements.
The CenCITT internal Request for Proposals (RFP) requires that each proposed project develop a QA/QC plan and appoint a QA/QC supervisor. The Science Advisory Committee reviews each plan as part of the proposal review process. Since almost all of CenCITT's research includes participation from graduate and undergraduate students, QA/QC is as much of an educational process as a set of experimental guidelines. CenCITT's goal is to emphasize quality in such a way that it becomes second nature to all students involved with its projects. Communication among students and faculty throughout CenCITT is encouraged so that plans and analytical procedures can be compared and constantly improved upon.
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