The routes to convert CO₂ into environmentally benign materials have attracted wide attentions. In this work, an emerging process to produce poly(butylene carbonate) (or PBC) from direct copolymerization of carbon dioxide and 1,4-butanediol is firstly simulated with analyses on the CO₂ emission ratio (CO₂-e, in kg-CO₂/kg-PBC) and yearly unit manufacturing cost of product (YUMC, in USD/kg). In order to address the issues associated with large amount of solvents used in the lab scale, two proposed scenarios including the reduction of solvent amount, and heat integration by vapor recompression cycle (VRC) were simulated. It is found that CO₂-e is reduced by 82.0% (from 30.06 to 5.42) when the solvent amount is reduced to 10%, and another 19.9% reduction in CO₂-e (to 4.34) when applying the VRC. YUMCs are reduced by ca. 68% for both proposed scenarios (from 5.62 to ca. 1.8). The findings reported in this study may prove informative for developing CO₂ conversion technologies from lab scale to industrial scale.

将CO ₂转化为对环境无害的材料的途径引起了广泛的关注。在这项工作中，首先通过分析CO ₂排放比（CO ₂ -e，单位：kg-），模拟了一种新兴的由二氧化碳与1,4-丁二醇直接共聚生产聚碳酸亚丁酯（或PBC）的方法。CO ₂ / kg-PBC）和产品的年度单位制造成本（YUMC，以USD / kg为单位）。为了解决与实验室规模中使用的大量溶剂相关的问题，对两种建议的方案进行了模拟，包括减少溶剂量以及通过蒸汽再压缩循环（VRC）进行热集成。发现CO ₂当溶剂量减少到10％时，-e减少82.0％（从30.06减少到5.42 ），使用VRC时，CO ₂ -e减少19.9％（到4.34）。YUMC减少了约。两种拟议方案（从5.62到大约1.8）的68％。这项研究报告的发现可能证明对从实验室规模到工业规模的CO ₂转化技术的发展很有帮助。