Development of two plant-wide glycerol carbonate production processes: Design, optimization and environmental analysis

This work firstly presents the rigorous modeling of the two plant-wide glycerol carbonate (GC) production processes through the transesterification reaction of glycerol (GLY). One is the Separated Reaction and Distillation (SRD) process, and the other is the Reactive Distillation-based (RD) process. This work covers the thermodynamic and kinetic verification, the rigorous simulation of the two processes, and optimization of the proposed processes based on simulated annealing method. From optimization, it is found that the RD process reduced about 33.1% cost from the SRD process. Also, carbon emission analyses are performed on the two optimized processes, in which the CO₂ emission amount per unit amount of GC formation (CO₂-e, in kg CO₂/kg GC) are calculated. It is reported that the RD process reduces 36.1% of CO₂ emission (CO₂-e=0.207) compared with the SRD process (CO₂-e=0.322).