Source: David E. Bernal Neira

Coordinators: Prof. Laura R. Conde (lrconder@unal.edu.co), Prof. Alvaro Orjuela (aorjuelal@unal.edu.co) Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering

Professors David E. Bernal Neira from Purdue University, Juan Gabriel Segovia from the University of Guanajuato (Mexico), and Mariano Martin from the University of Salamanca delivered in Bogotá-Colombia, a course on sustainable process design and optimization with application in biorefineries. The course was organized by the Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department at the National University of Colombia. The international seminar on sustainable process design and optimization was planned as an academic and scientific space involving top researchers from around the world to present current trends on high-efficiency processes potentially applied in biorefineries: from the basics required to construct the conceptual models all the way to the experimental validation at the pilot or industrial scale. Metrics used for the sustainability assessment at the early design stages were discussed, and also described how process design is approached as an optimization problem where models of the different stages will be formulated and solved simultaneously using suitable non-linear optimization methods and algorithms. Finally, some of the major challenges involved in the biorefinery concept, in the assessment of sustainability and in the deployment of the optimization methods, were presented in order to identify those fields where research is on-going.