Question

I need new ideas for chemical engineering project, new ideas plz , thanks

Answer 1

One of the recent topics interest in process engineeing is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

LCA is a methodology of finding environmental impcacts casued by a product or a service over its complete life cycle.

Any chemical process causes many types of environmental impacts due to energy and resource use. If you could quantify those impacts by some mean we can focus on steps in a process which are causing more impacts. Then we can reduce those impacts by using knowledge of process engineering. This quantification of impacts is done in LCA.

Now what is LCA and how it's done ?

For example take a waste water treatment (WWT) plant. It involves many steps in water treatment process such as collection of waste water, pumping, primary treatment secondary treatment, areation, sludge separation etc. Each step uses energy, materials which ultimately cause impacts on our environment. So in LCA one collects a data of every process input and output which is called as inventory analysis. Then the process is modelled into a software(there are many opensource softawares) which gives us environmental impacts caused in each step. And as per the result we can take appropriate actions to reduce those impacts. There is plenty of data availble on internet about LCA foe example take a look at this article 'Life Cycle Assessment of a municipal wastewater treatment plant: a case study in Suzhou, China'. LCA is data intensive process which requires collection of data on process input/output. Collected data is then fed to certain softwares which one can easily learn in 3–4 days or a week.

LCA can be carried out for any product or service avaible in the world if you have proper data of the process. There are many LCA studies available for chemical products, energy production, refineries etc.  

One more plus point, there are very few (really small number) research papers available on LCA in Indian context. So if you come up with good results, there is good chance of getting it published in very reputed journal.