专题：Dispersed Manufacturing
授课时间：2015年5月16日9:30-11:00（2学时）
授课地点：A 01主教学楼W101房间
主讲人：Prof. Edward L. Cussler
听课班级：石油与化学工程学院全体本科生，欢迎研究生和老师参加。
【主讲人简介】
Edward L. Cussler, currently Distinguished Institute Professor at the University of Minnesota, received his B.E. with honors from Yale University in 1961, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1963 and 1965, respectively, working with E. N. Lightfoot. After thirteen years teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, Cussler joined the University of Minnesota in 1980. He has written over 250 articles and five books, includingDiffusion,Bioseparations, and more recently,Chemical Product Design. Cussler has received the Colburn and Lewis Awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), for whom he served as Director, Vice President, and President. He has received the Separations Science Award from the American Chemical Society, the Merryfield Design Award from the American Society of Engineering Education, and honorary doctorate degrees from the Universities of Lund and Nancy. Cussler is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
【授课内容简介】
In the last decade, the chemical business underwent a profound change because of new natural gas resources released by fracking. This change had two major effects. First, it meant that more jobs will be available over the next twenty years in traditional chemical manufacturing. Second, it allowed more time to develop a sustainable chemical business.
A “sustainable chemical industry” implies using renewable feeds, especially those derived from agriculture. The ease of doing so depends on the amount of chemical produced. For example, antibiotics like penicillin already use agricultural waste products as a feed. The amount of antibiotic produced is tiny relative to commodity chemicals like olefins, and the transportation cost of transporting this high value- added product to market is minor. Thus the production of antibiotics will remain centralized, as it is now.
In contrast, the production of fuels from biomass will involve huge amount of feed and of product of much less value per kilo than antibiotics. Transportation costs of moving both feed and fuel will be major. As a result, the production of fuels will probably involve many smaller plants, whose lower efficiency is balanced by lower costs of transportation.
Thus a sustainable chemical industry may involve dispersed manufacture, rather than the highly centralized plants characteristic of today’s industry. This paper will discuss such a future for ammonia, the key chemical fertilizer, which can be made from air, water, and wind. This talk describes what such a chemical plant could look like, and the advantages and debits of such dispersed manufacture.
