Flavio Manenti

• Professor
• Professor at Politecnico di Milano

Biogas has emerged as a valid feedstock for biomethanol production from steam reforming. This study investigates an alternative layout based on an auto-thermal electrified reforming assuming a 1 MW equivalent anaerobic digestion plant as a source for methanol synthesis. The process considers an oxy-steam combustion of biogas and direct carbon seque...

This study compares the climate change impacts of three methanol production processes: the conventional method via steam methane reforming, and two alternatives-gasiforming and electriforming-which utilize plastic waste as feedstock. A gate-to-gate LCA approach is employed, considering credits and substitution impacts for avoiding traditional end-o...

The Claus process is a sulfur recovery unit wherein hydrogen sulfide is converted into the elemental sulfur. This study aims to model the thermal section of the Claus process, which consists of a reaction furnace and a waste heat boiler, as a configuration of two reactors, and subsequently optimize the entire section. Two different reduced kinetic...

The invasive water hyacinth (WH), Eichhornia crassipes, poses a severe environmental and economic threat to Ethiopian water bodies, particularly in the Rift Valley water bodies and Lake Tana. Known for its rapid proliferation, WH outcompetes native vegetation, doubling its coverage every 13 days, and has the potential to produce 140–350 tons of dry...

The definition of process operations and risk analysis is two mandatory steps in the basic/detailed engineering phases of chemical plants. Both steps are usually performed with interdisciplinary tasks but in segregated ways and within converging iterative procedures where the output of the one is feeding the other step and vice versa. This work aim...

Many lakes and rivers all over the globe are experiencing environmental, human health, and socioeconomic development issues due to the spread of invasive water hyacinth (WH) weed. WH is regarded as one of the world's most destructive weeds and is nearly impossible to control and eliminate due to its rapid expansion and ability to double its coverag...

Many lakes and rivers all over the globe are experiencing environmental, human health, and socio-economic development issues due to the spread of invasive water hyacinth (WH) weed. WH is regarded as one of the world’s most destructive weeds and is nearly impossible to control and eliminate due to its rapid expansion and ability to double its covera...

A cytotoxicity study is performed on a poly(methyl methacrylate) polymer (PMMA) to be used for the fabrication of bone tissue by Rapid Prototyping (RP). The solution polymerization is conducted in a pilot plant reactor using more appropriated reagents in consideration of the medical application. Moreover, the polymer is efficiently handled to avoid...

The patented technology is a novel, portable, non-invasive, and flexible technical solution for converting biogas into valuable chemical compounds, such as bio-methanol and bio-dimethyl ether (bio-DME). It consists of compact modules, connected to each other through a flange-valve-flange system, to be installed downstream an existing traditional bi...

Bio-dimethyl ether (bio-DME) is a promising advanced biofuel for the disposal of conventional diesel fuel, which is one of the most relevant sources of particulate matter and nitrogen oxides in urban centres and is completely banned from some European cities. DME is produced in two ways: dehydration of methanol produced from syngas (indirect or two...

Anaerobic Digestion represents an economically and environmentally friendly technology that allows the production of biogas starting from organic substrates. Single substrate digestion often unexploited the total biomass capacity, resulting in low methane yield. On the other hand, it has been proved that biogas production can be significantly impro...

The patented technology is a novel, portable, non-invasive, and flexible technical solution for converting biogas into valuable chemical compounds, such as bio-methanol and bio-dimethyl ether (bio-DME). It consists of compact modules, connected to each other through a flange-valve-flange system, to be installed downstream of an existing traditional...

In the last decades, microalgae have gained a lot of interest in the energy and chemical industry thanks to their higher biofuel productivity potential rather than other land plants. To better exploit their green nature and renewable power, anaerobic digestion (AD) fits perfectly for the scope. AD is a metabolic process that generates a methane-ric...

Data driven food‐manufacturing systems assure cost reduction, increased efficiency, improved product quality. These elements come together in a virtuous circle of digital transformation centered on sustainability. Viticulture is among the first applications of the smart‐agriculture concept. Precision viticulture has become one of the agribusiness s...

Facing the emerging needs for energy-enhanced separation units, this work evaluated the triethylene glycol (TEG) regeneration, used as a dehydrating agent of natural gas from wells, by a novel thermosyphon-assisted falling film distillation technology, called Destubcal. The pilot-scale device has an innovative heat supply through a two-phase closed...

Natural gas is an important precursor to produce synthesis gas through the steam reforming process. This work aims to map the optimal operating conditions of a steam methane reformer based on the design of experiments (DOE) approach and response surface methodology (RSM) relying on a phenomenological model validated with industrial data. A screenin...

In RED II, the overall EU target for renewable energy sources consumption by 2030 has been raised to 32%. Biogas is an important contributor to the future of bioenergy and its targets. The most used technology processes to exploit biogas are the production of heat and electricity in Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants and Biomethane Injection Plan...

Energy demand is increasingly the most relevant cost item in chemical plants. Operating expenses indeed play a main role in all plants processing large amounts of feedstock via well-established processes in the petrochemical industry. In staged operations, the optimal number of stages is usually obtained by means of an economic optimization. Howeve...

The reactor is one of the most important equipment to be designed for optimal process operations. An appropriate reactor modeling leads to an efficient and optimal process conceptual design, simulation, and eventually construction. The key for success in this step is mainly related to kinetics. The present work is centered toward process simulation...

During the last decades, energy and process integration have become the most spread practices to optimize chemical processes both from economic and environmental perspectives. While the design of the integrated and conventional configurations are usually compared by referring to nominal operating conditions, assessing the implications of process in...

In the digital era, data mining, analysis, and interpretation are of primary interest for industry 4.0. Processes provide a huge amount of dataset, which should be processed in the shortest possible time. Reliable process monitoring in real-time is of primary concern in the chemical industry due to its effect on the production costs as well as on d...

Kinetic modelling covers a key role in process simulation and design. Recently the methanol sector is assisting a remarkable enhancement due to its applications as fuel, solvent, and precursor as shown in Bozzano and Manenti (2016). The increasing number of patents, the market prospects, and recent research witness this renewed interest. However, d...

With the increasing amount of data to quickly process, surrogate modeling has become a topic of major interest in process engineering during the last decades. Recently, black-box models have gained renewed interest as effective tools to reduce the computational effort and to enhance the solution of optimization algorithms. Among the surrogate model...

Process simulation and digital twins are of paramount importance to design new processes or optimize already existing plants and equipment. The main drawback with current process simulation software is the computational time required to obtain a solution convergence towards a new steady-state. Especially when the input or the output to a system are...

During the design of a process, the most economically impactful choices are often taken with limited data and details available on the specifics of unit operations. Despite this fact, the effect some of these choices have on the final economic performance of the plant can be dramatic and far more influential than later decisions. The availability o...

H 2 S is becoming more and more appealing as a source for hydrogen and syngas generation. Its hydrogen production potential is studied by several research groups by means of catalytic and thermal conversions. While the characterization of catalytic processes is strictly dependent on the catalyst adopted and difficult to be generalized, the characte...

An upgraded digital twin of the Anaerobic Digestion Model 1 is proposed to enhance its industrial applicability and range of use. Through the optimization and generalization of kinetic coefficients toward co-digestion reactors simulation and insertion of new equations for the complete biokinetics modeling of H2S, the proposed model can predict more...

When chemical processes involve the treatment of raw materials characterized by unstable properties over the year’ s seasons, upstream perturbations could affect the downstream operation feasibility. This research work discusses how non-idealities can be exploited to enhance the flexibility of the operation for an ABE/W purification section. In par...

Recovery of agro and food-industrial waste and their valorisation via green technologies can help to outline new concepts of industrial strategies. In this contest, a fat enriched of added-value components was extracted from coffee silverskin by applying a supercritical fluid extraction technique (sc-CO 2 ). An appropriate modulation of process par...

Water hyacinth (WH, Eichhornia crassipes, ’Emboch’ in Ethiopia) is a highly disturbing class of invasive and noxious aquatic plants found worldwide in other water bodies and as such is a prime problem in Lake Tana. One approach to successfully control the rapid invasion of WH is to utilize it as a feedstock to produce high-valued commodities in a b...

Sustainable development has become the cornerstone of environmental policy worldwide and a leading principle for innovative industrial processes. The philosophy lies in the progress in balance with nature that ensures the existing productive systems' survival through a new design paradigm shift. Even in the industrial framework, the sustainability...

Nowadays, desalination continues to expand globally, which is one of the most effective solutions to solve the problem of the global drinking water shortage. However, desalination is not a fail-safe process and has many environmental and human health consequences. This paper investigated the desalination procedure of seawater with different technol...

H2S and CO2 are two well-known emissions with cumbersome management and not yet established bulk utilization plans. The invention converts H2S and CO2 in syngas and, as the only by-products, elemental sulphur and water by means of a dedicated (i) Regenerative Thermal Reactor (RTR) and (ii) Acid Gas to Syngas (AG2S) process layout thanks to the over...

Catalyzed chemical reactions inside tubular reactors play a key role in steam methane reforming process, as they define the temperature and composition profiles of the reformer and, consequently, its efficiency. Although the kinetic modeling of reforming reactions has already been widely discussed, studies that carry out the comparison between kine...

The increasing demand for ethanol-based disinfectants due to the COVID-19 pandemic has driven the emergence of innovative strategies to avoid the risk of shortage and reduce production costs. Distillation is well-known as the major energy consumer and cost driver for ethanol recovery in conventional distilleries. Our research team has been developi...

In recent years, energy efficiency has been one of the topics of major concern from a worldwide perspective as clearly stated by the International Energy Agency (IEA,2021). The energy waste reduction not only improves the process performances from an economic perspective but reduces as well the equivalent CO 2 emissions. This research work is the p...

A systemic approach was proposed to analyse a complex system such that of food value chains. Typical management methodologies were applied to a citrus derivatives industry and, based on the survey outcomes, a sustainable optimisation plan was formulated integrating the critical domains of the water-food-energy nexus. The overall process was mapped...

Engaged in the global trend towards more energy-efficient and sustainable technologies, our research team has developed a falling film distillation apparatus with an innovative heat supply through a two-phase closed thermosyphon. In order to evaluate the performance of this energy-intensified distillation process, a supervised machine learning (ML)...

Process integration has become the best practice over the last years in separation units design. In particular, distillation trains can be reduced in a single column shell by means of internal separating wall under the name of Dividing Wall Column. This configuration allows on average for a 30% total costs reduction and is more and more popular for...

High accuracy in Equations of State (EoSs) is becoming a more and more critical aspect for design and operational purposes in different areas of chemical and process engineering. It is well-known that improper predictions of mixture properties provide large deviations in process simulations, process control actions, estimation of operative conditio...

Linear Model Predictive Control (MPC) can be considered as the state of the art advanced process control technology in model-based automation of continuous chemical processes. For (semi-)batch processes, that often present a strongly nonlinear (or even unstable) behavior in combination with fast dynamics, Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) i...

Multi Effect Distillation (MED) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) processes have been extensively used to produce freshwater from seawater resources. Among many performance indicators, energy consumption of different configuration of hybrid system of MED and RO processes have been analysed in the past. Hybrid MED-RO system is energy intensive and use of fos...

Fouling is a substantial economic, energy, and safety issue for all the process industry applications, heat transfer units in particular. Although this phenomenon can be mitigated, it cannot be avoided and proper cleaning cycle scheduling is the best way to deal with it. After thorough literature research about the most reliable fouling model descr...

The present paper describes a collaborative experience in the development and realization of a new joint educational program. The great motivation for designing the joint training program is the urgent need for the industrial sector to promote vocational training and enhance the leadership and professional skills of the staff, as well as to build s...

Green Economy is the key word of the last two decades. In this context, an important role is covered by anaerobic digestion (AD), treating organic waste fractions to recover both fertilizing elements and energy. Countless biochemical reactions lead to substrate degradation and biogas development. Despite AD has been used for many years, its study f...

This work presents a case study for the application of physical systems modelling techniques on cloud computing infrastructures. The described physical system is the mi-cronized silverskin lipids extraction using supercritical carbon dioxide on laboratory scale equipment. The experimental data of the extractions are modeled using a simplified dual...

H2S and CO2 are well-known emissions with cumbersome management and no established bulk utilization plans. The invention converts H2S and CO2 in syngas and, as the only by-products, elemental sulfur, and water through a dedicated (i) Regenerative Thermal Reactor (RTR) and (ii) Acid Gas to Syngas (AG2S) process layout thanks to the overall reaction:...

The new sustainability goals aimed at mitigating the environmental impacts of energy and chemical industry result in more considerable implications on process design than the mere substitution of the raw material to be processed. The entire design procedure was based so far on the needs of fossil fuels and petrochemical raw materials and was orient...

This work presents an overview of the patent activity and filing trends on acetic acid industrial processes. Data were obtained with Orbit Intelligence patent database, using both keywords and classification codes (IPC, CPC, and C-sets). The complete search strategy has been reported. Data analysis reveals that methanol carbonylation is the most pa...

The ongoing COVID-19 epidemic highlights the need for effective tools capable of predicting the onset of infection outbreaks at their early stages. The tracing of confirmed cases and the prediction of the local dynamics of contagion through early indicators are crucial measures to a successful fight against emerging infectious diseases (EID). The...

Flexible operations design is one of the key challenges of process engineering over the last years. However, even when uncertainty during the design phase is taken into account, the vast majority of research works refer to steady state conditions only, neglecting the system behaviour during the transition from the nominal state to the perturbed one...