Future chemical FActories: Sustainability through Smart Digitalisation (FFASSD)

Process development for the sustainable exploitation of renewable feedstock in the chemical industry forms a key societal challenge to reach future climate goals. KU Leuven has developed a unique biorefinery technology that converts wood to plastic building blocks and commodity chemicals. To turn such a successful lab-scale process into an industrial one, a series of capital intensive and laborious steps is classically required, which impedes rapid industrialization and, hence innovation. The digital twin concept, as currently developed within mechanical engineering at KU Leuven, is an interesting key enabling technology to tackle this challenge. A digital twin is a virtual replica of an asset fed with data from the physical set-up, which allows for cost- and time-effective analysis, optimization, up-scaling and virtual scenario assessment. The aim of FFASSD is to apply the digital twin concept on this inventive biorefinery technology with the objective to optimize the process in an integrated way for performance, energy and resource efficiency, environmental impact and cost. World leading expertise at KU Leuven in the fields of mechatronics and engineering dynamics, chemistry and catalysis, and life cycle management will join forces to realize a fully bio-based chemical factory thus contributing to an accelerated transition of our linear fossil-based economy towards a circular bio-based economy.

Keywords:biorefinery, digital twin, life cycle analysis, Industry 4.0

Disciplines:Life cycle engineering, Numerical modelling and design, Agricultural and natural resource economics, environmental and ecological economics, Heterogeneous catalysis