Coupling process engineering with life cycle assessment for eco-design of membrane filtration

s Ultrafiltration (UF) is widely used in the biorefinery process but is not well represented in common simulation tools. Due to the lack of a broadly applicable model, a model was developed and simulated in ProsimPlus®. The model has been used to describe the performance of an ultrafiltration membrane for concentrating phenolic compounds under polarization effects. This article demonstrates how the integration of process system engineering and life cycle assessment provides an assessment of environmental impacts without relying on time-consuming and costly experiments. Therefore, this paper proposes an eco-design tool for the biorefinery process by coupling ultrafiltration modeling with environmental impact assessment. The parameters were identified for subsequent simulation in Simapro® Developer to quantify the environmental impact of the ultrafiltration process. The ultrafiltration system involves three key stages: cleaning, filtration, and infrastructure. The results show that filtration is the main contributor to the environmental impact, but cleaning frequency is important in determining the relative impact of each stage. The study also demonstrates that optimizing operating parameters, particularly pressure and tangential velocity, reduces the need for membrane modules, thereby reducing the impact of cleaning, filtration, and infrastructure. The model was evaluated under different operating conditions, with Reynolds numbers ranging from 4000 to 6000 and pressures from 0.8 to 2 bar. The lowest environmental impact was obtained at 2 bar and Re = 5500. Under these optimized conditions, the environmental impacts of the filtration and cleaning stages were reduced by up to 55% and 72%, respectively. These results demonstrate that determining the number of modules and the cleaning frequency are crucial for the proper application of this approach.