Walter Wukovits

During the last decades, significant challenges for steel plant operators have emerged, embracing decreasing raw material qualities, increasing demands in product quality and variety, stricter environmental regulations, as well as supply-chain transformations. Consequently, new operational philosophies as well as adapted production routes are required, being different from those of state-of-the-art iron- and steel-making. To enable these new developments, the authors employed process simulation and developed a holistic metallurgical model library covering a wide range of iron- and steel-making aggregates. This simulation environment based on first-principles modeling provides all necessary thermodynamic properties and enables the flexible setup of any type of metallurgical process route. In this work, an overview of the setup of this simulation platform is presented, together with results addressing selected challenges such as strategic operational planning, problematic trace material distributions, and process development, in relation to the growing use of artificial intelligence.

Starch and lignin are promising biopolymers for the production of biodegradable biocomposite materials. The possibility of processing starch into thermoplastic materials qualifies it as a starting material for the preparation of thermoplastic packaging films, and the combination with lignin can even out some inherent weak points of starch, such as moisture and water sensitivity, and can add additional features like antioxidant activity. Lignins from herbaceous biomass carry building blocks that are not found in wood lignins and are known for their bioactivity, such as p-coumaric acid or ferulic acid. In this work, a protocol was developed to initially prepare hybrids of wheat starch granules and lignin nanoparticles, which were then plasticized using glycerol in an extrusion process to produce thin films. The lignin-containing thermoplastic starch films showed higher Young’s moduli and less elongation at break compared to neat thermoplastic starch films, while tensile strength remained at the level of the neat films. Thermal stability was slightly increased by lignin addition, and oxygen transmission rates were low for lignin contents as low as 1 wt%. The hydrophobicity of the lignin-containing films increased strongly, and they showed an elevated antioxidant activity over several hours, which was also maintained after 24 h. The preparation of hybrid wheat starch lignin particles was successfully tested for the extrusion of thermoplastic starch films with improved thermomechanical properties, decreased water sensitivity, and prolonged antioxidant activity.

One of the primary objectives of biogas refinement is carbon dioxide (CO ₂ ) removal. Several studies investigated the effect of piperazine (PZ) in a mixture with other amines; however, its capability has rarely been investigated as a stand‐alone absorbent. In this study, CO ₂ solubility equilibrium simulations are performed using the Aspen Plus (v7.3.2, AspenTech) simulation tool for the CO ₂ /H ₂ O and CO ₂ /H ₂ O/aqueous PZ component systems to predict the CO ₂ absorption rate and absorption capacity of the solvent. CO ₂ equilibrium partial pressures (up to120 kPa) were calculated using electrolyte non‐random two liquid (ENRTL) model with a full explanation of crucial dissociation representing the complicated electrolyte system based on Henry’s Law. The ENRTL model was used to calculate the activity coefficients in the electrolyte system, while the dissociation and equilibrium constants were implemented as a function of temperature and or obtained from reference state free energy. Aspen Plus calculations from the ENRTL model showed excellent results having less than 4% deviation from the experimental results reported in the published literature. A selected range of 0.1–1.2 m PZ concentration and temperature between 298–343 K was used to estimate CO ₂ loadings using the simulations from the validated model. Various concentrations of aqueous PZ were then compared to benchmark solvent, that is, pressurized water for CO ₂ absorption loading. The observed result showed that CO ₂ absorption at PZ concentration of 0.5 m was 120% higher than the pressurized water solvent at the same temperature and partial pressure conditions. Additionally, the efficiency of CO ₂ removal obtained by using PZ was also observed to be higher than pressurized water scrubbing. In short, the obtained encouraging results portrays that PZ may be used as model solvent for CO ₂ absorption from biogas and to limit its effect toward global warming.

The collection of reliable data is an important and time-consuming part of the life cycle inventory (LCI) phase. Automation of individual steps can help to obtain a higher volume of or more realistic data. The aim of this paper is to survey the current state of automation potential in the scientific literature published between 2008 and 2021, with a focus on LCI in the area of process engineering. The results show that automation was most frequently found in the context of process simulation (via interfaces between software), for LCI database usage (e.g., via using ontologies for linking data) and molecular structure models (via machine learning processes such as artificial neural networks), which were also the categories where the highest level of maturity of the models was reached. No further usage could be observed in the areas of automation techniques for exploiting plant data, scientific literature, process calculation, stoichiometry and proxy data. The open science practice of sharing programming codes, software or other newly created resources was only followed in 20% of cases, uncertainty evaluation was only included in 10 out of 30 papers and only 30% of the developed methods were used in further publication, always including at least one of the first authors. For these reasons, we recommend encouraging exchange in the LCA community and in interdisciplinary settings to foster long-term sustainable development of new automation methodologies supporting data generation.