Exergetic sensibility analysis and environmental evaluation of chitosan production from shrimp exoskeleton in Colombia

Waste valorization is one of the key aspects of cleaner production, there are a large number of residues such as crustacean exoskeletons which can be potentially used for obtaining valuable products. A comprehensive analysis involving both exergy and environmental aspects of chitosan production from shrimp shell wastes is presented. Mass and energy balances, needed to assess the presented process, were obtained by using Aspen Plus (R) software. It was obtained a chitosan production rate of 12,152 t/y from a fed flow of 57,000 t/y of shrimp exoskeleton. Process simulation allowed estimation of environmental performance by applying the Waste Reduction Algorithm (WAR). The results revealed that the process consumes potential environmental impacts (PEI), obtaining negative values for these variables (in terms of generation rates) in all cases. Besides, the exergy analysis reported a global exergy efficiency of 4.58%, obtaining that astaxanthin removal stage reached the highest irreversibilities and exergy of wastes (707,699.57 MJ/h and 707,738.09 MJ/h). The sensitivity analysis showed that the efficiency of depigmentation stage can be increased by 92%, applying process improvements. This means an increase of the global exergy efficiency by 58.93%. (c) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.