The November issue of CJCE features a special issue section comprising articles from the International Conference on Sustainable Development in Chemical and Environmental Engineering (SDCEE-2024) as well as new additions to the Process Safety Special Series.
This month’s Editor’s Choice is the preface to the SDCEE-2024 special issue section, written by guest editor Avinash Chandra of the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology: “Preface to the special issue of the International Conference on Sustainable Development in Chemical and Environmental Engineering (SDCEE-2024)”. This special issue section contains 13 articles based on papers presented at SDCEE-2024, held from February 22–24, 2024, at Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology (TIET) in Patiala, India. As Dr. Chandra notes, “The conference emphasized the necessity of sustainable development across various chemical engineering domains, including materials, energy, environment, processing, and green technologies.” Be sure to access the preface, which will be free-to-read for a limited time, as well as the excellent selection of articles from this special section.
The second issue highlight is a new addition to the Process Safety Special Series: “A holistic approach for assessing occupational health risk due to fugitive emissions in petrochemical processes: Inherent health hazard level index (IHHLI)”, by Yousef A. Alhamdani, Mimi H. Hassim, and Salim M. Shaik. Within this article, the authors develop “an OH risk assessment methodology that provides an effective assessment that takes into consideration hazards at the source, pathway, and receptor”. The article “presents an index-based method named the inherent health hazard level index (IHHLI) developed for evaluating the severity of the fugitive emission-induced OH risk” and “The IHHLI is developed by an expert-based selection of the most common and relevant health hazard indicators published in the literature.” The authors note “Based on industry testing, the IHHLI can provide a reliable OH hazard evaluation.” Explore this article this month while it is free-to-read.
The third issue highlight from the November issue is also a part of the Process Safety Special Series: “Identifying design criteria for implementing inherent safety in chemical process industries part 1: Design reasoning”, by Zafirah Zakaria, Kamarizan Kidam, and Mimi H. Hassim. This study “aims to identify potential indicators of [inherent safety design] ISD for each inherent safety (IS) keyword, which will be referred to later as design reasoning (DR), based on 529 selected cases that suggest design changes that enhance the safety of processes, materials, or equipment.” Ultimately, the “Results showed that moderation inherent safety is a popular strategy used to implement IS” and the “findings serve as a valuable reference for designers or engineer attempting to implement ISD in their design task.” This article is also currently free-to-read.
In the final featured article of this issue, an open access article titled “Semi-continuous non-sterile production of medium chain-length polyhydroxyalkanoates from fatty acids”, authors Warren Blunt, Alain Lagassé, Jacob Harvey, Richard Sparling, Daniel Gapes, David Levin, and Nazim Cicek, hypothesize “that under non-axenic conditions, the anti-microbial properties of fatty acids would reduce growth of microbial competitors and allow Pseudomonas putida LS46 to dominate the population resulting in non-sterile mcl-PHA production.” The authors note that “This study is the first of its kind to report that purely mcl-PHAs were produced after prolonged periods in a non-sterile environment and demonstrate that medium chain-length fatty acids exert a strong selective pressure toward organisms that synthesize mcl-PHA. This suggests an opportunity for mcl-PHA production in open continuous cultivation, which could reduce both fixed and operating costs.”
CJCE’s latest virtual issue is currently free-to-read: The Global Scope of Process Safety Research. This virtual issue comprises articles published in 2023 and 2024 from CJCE’s recent Process Safety Special Series focused on global research aiming to make chemical process industries safer for workers and the public. Be sure to access this issue and explore exiting recent research from around the world in the process safety field.