9528680 Cooney A critical challenge facing the chemical and pharmaceutical industries is management of the complexity that arises from diverse and often conflicting objectives in product and process development. Simultaneously dealing with environmental, cost, safety, and flexibility objectives in design makes solution of the optimization problem difficult. The goal of this research is to develop a rigorous methodology for evaluating and choosing between alternative manufacturing processes that allow for introduction of environmental decisions early in the design strategy. The approach involves selection of performance metrics that reflect the differing objectives and developing a design tool that can simultaneously handle multiple and conflicting objectives. The performance metrics along with a hierarchical method for decomposition of processes will be used to formalize a decision process for process selection. Multiple case studies will be examined from processes used to manufacture chiral pharmaceuticals; these case studies will be used as a basis for developing teaching modules to introduce environmentally conscious manufacturing into undergraduate and graduate design classes. Case studies involving chiral drug manufacturing will be used in this research because promising new production methods are being introduced in this segment of the pharmaceutical industry. These new production methods could yield purer products, require smaller capital investments, and have less environmental impact. The results of this work will provide a framework for implementation of software to aid the design engineer. While focused on pharmaceuticals, the framework will be applicable to chemical processing more generally as well.
