Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Stakeholders
Enterprise/owner
Government
Municipality
Suppliers and customers
Bankers
Designers
Socioeconomic
environment
Upstream
Downstream
Energy from
biomass
Feeds
Products
side of
side of
PROCESS
supply chain
supply chain
Natural environment
FIGURE 7.2
Connections between a process, supply chain, and socioeconomic environment.
emissions. Can other parties treat this waste for a fee? Meanwhile, environmental
emissions (gas, noise, smell) must be kept under control within the limits of the per-
mits. This touches upon a nontechnical but equally important
issue, which
is to obtain a societal license to build and operate a process on some local industrial
complex, endorsed by legal permits by the government. Last but not least, finance is
another
“
supply
”
aspect. Money must be made available, often in the form of loans,
to finance the design, engineering, construction, and start-up of a process. Figure 7.3
illustrates the main connections between a process, its supply chain, and socioeco-
nomic environment.
The enterprise and the supply chain, extending outside the enterprise, form the
highest level of aggregation, at which the external specifications for the process
design are set. The smallest scale in a process design deals with molecules. Figure 7.4
shows a multiscale representation plotted versus time and geometric size. A cascade
arises from the enterprise and supply chain at the upper scale down to the molecular
scale.
At every scale in this figure, one must create the associated structures (units,
compartments, particles) by design. This requires a specification of the function
of a structure at each of these scales, a choice of suitable building blocks to create
the structure while connecting the blocks by streams that carry suitable physical
resources (chemical species, energy, momentum) or signals (for control). This brings
us to the point where the focus shifts to developing a systematic view on the inside
of a process.
“
supply
”
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