Process systems engineering for chemicals and fuels within the safe operating space
Research Seminar Series
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Date
16 Feb 2026
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Organiser
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, PolyU
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Time
17:00 - 18:30
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Venue
Online via ZOOM
Speaker
Prof. Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez
Remarks
Meeting link will be sent to successful registrants. If you have enquiries regarding E-certificate after the seminar, please contact david.kuo@polyu.edu.hk.
Summary
Operating safely within the Earth’s ecological capacity is a major challenge faced by humanity to ensure sustainable development. In this talk, I will start by motivating the need to transition towards more sustainable chemicals, focusing on replacing fossil carbon with renewable carbon in the chemical sector. I will then describe how to evaluate the environmental impact of emerging chemical technologies, discussing the main advantages and limitations of process-level and life cycle assessment (LCA) metrics, including the recently developed planetary boundaries indicators. I will then show how to couple sustainability metrics with optimization models to identify more sustainable portfolios of chemical technologies and hybridized chemical clusters, focusing on carbon capture and utilization, biomass, biogas and chemical recycling routes to complement fossil pathways. I will conclude the talk with an outlook on future research directions, including the emerging trend of accelerating sustainability assessments using artificial intelligence.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez
Professor
Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Dr. Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez completed his M.Eng. in Chemical Engineering from Universidad de Murcia (Spain), and his Ph.D. in Process Systems Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), working afterward as Fulbright Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University (US). He then joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) in 2008, before moving to The University of Manchester (UK) in 2014 and to Imperial College London (UK) in 2016. Since February 2019, he works as Professor in Chemical Systems Engineering in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering of ETH Zürich (Switzerland). Dr. Guillén-Gosálbez’s research interests focus on the simultaneous optimization of the environmental and economic performance of process industries. He currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the journals Sustainable Production and Consumption and Helvetica and participates in the steering committee of the NCCR Catalysis Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research. He was also part of the EU panel on Safe and Sustainable by Design chemicals and materials. He has received several awards, including the Senior Moulton Medal of the IChemE (UK), the Top Doctoral Student Award of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, the Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship, and the Young Investigator Award of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.
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