Application trends of advanced functional materials in chemical process design for green and efficient engineering

The environmental degradation, a shift towards sustainable chemical engineering is currently underway globally with advanced functional materials, such as catalysts, membranes, nanomaterials, and composites, functioning as the major drivers of enhanced reaction efficiency, energy reduction, and environmental improvement. Despite the potential of these materials in energy storage, carbon dioxide capture and water purification, there are factors that limit their large-scale industrial adoption due to concerns associated with scalability, cost and durability. The current study examines trends of application and environment performance of such materials and their techno-economic viability as applied to green process design. This paper employs the combination of systematic literature review, case studies, and quantitative analysis of data to compare graphene oxide (GO) membranes with conventional reverse osmosis (RO) membranes in the framework of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Findings indicate that GO membranes have 57 % less energy and 60 % fewer CO 2 equivalent emissions compared to RO membranes. Moreover, the used artificial intelligence (AI) methods increase catalytic selectivity by 20 % and water recovery efficiency by 25 %. It is on this premise that the authors suggest the digital performance database that can combine material properties in terms of energy consumption, separation efficiency, and catalytic performance. The current results all together depict the potential of functional materials in the context of sustainable engineering, at the same time highlighting the necessity to develop standardized synthetic procedures, adopt AI-based optimization techniques, and develop cost-saving schemes to ensure the widespread adoption of such functional materials in the industrial sector.