Pollution prevention for production systems of energetic materials

The Batch Design-Kit (BDK) environment is a software system for the development of batch manufacturing processes. Given a set of reaction pathways, BDK enables chemists and chemical engineers to investigate possible production routes, refine promising candidates and develop a detailed chemical recipe in an interactive manner. Automatic facility allocation of equipment for these conceptual recipes help determine the feasibility and efficiency of the processing idea at existing manufacturing sites. Material assessment reveals the environmental impact caused by the utilized chemical compounds and process mixtures. Automatic waste treatment synthesis generates efficient treatment strategies for all process wastes and calculates the residuals emitted to the environment. With process analysis based on the facility allocation, material assessment and treatment selection, alternative processing schemes can be ranked and potential problems, such as examination of equipment costs, regulatory compliance and expenditures for waste treatment, can be identified at an early stage of the process development. Through its material-centered design concept, BDK maintains a cause-effect relationship between process mixtures, operations and their economic and environmental performance. In that way, process improvement can be focused specifically on the replacement of offending chemicals and/or the improvement or modification of problematic operations or operation sequences.