2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Higher education is a pivotal player in sustainability education, contributing to the carbon footprint and serving as a role model for monitoring and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG). In particular, the Unit Operations Laboratory offers students invaluable opportunities to assess their carbon footprint within laboratory settings and engage in the practical application of life cycle assessment (LCA), a method to evaluate the environmental impact of a process from raw materials to waste. In this project, we aim to demonstrate a data-driven laboratory curriculum design with the integration of life cycle analysis. The developed database and educational platform can be adopted by a wide range of engineering disciplines.
The proposed curriculum design consists of the initial project selection based on equipment and inventory data availability, pilot-trial experiment with proposed process conditions and preliminary life cycle analysis, and modifying experimental conditions for comparison. Furthermore, this work is extended to an international collaboration with the Unit Operations laboratories from two different institutions examining the feasibility and scalability of the same project and collectively developing a teaching database for the common industrial process and equipment.
This presentation will showcase a selected project focusing on bioethanol production and purification, including the life cycle analysis (LCA) of various operational and production pathways. The upstream process is to be conducted in a 1 and 80 L bioreactor with refined sugars and corn syrup as the raw material to produce ethanol in an anaerobic fermentation process. The downstream will utilize a feedstock containing ethanol in a similar concentration to perform the distillation process via plate distillation columns with different heat duties. Data obtained from experiments and the established database will be implemented for analysis and ultimately to inform decision-making regarding the preferred materials and process conditions for less carbon footprint in the environment. With the various sized equipment available from the two Unit Operations labs, it is feasible to investigate the scalability, either size-down or scale-up, to validate the study of LCA and create a teaching database. Ultimately, the project will expand to other common chemical processes. The appropriate experimental design can be achieved through the LCA practices while meeting all necessary learning objectives and the expected engineering graduate attributes.