New sustainability indices for product design employing environmental impact and risk reduction: case study on gasoline blends

Gasoline blends are good examples of sustainable product design. Different gasoline blend products were modeled by Aspen HYSYS in order to estimate the octane numbers. New sustainability indices involving metrics such as octane number, mileage loss, potential environmental impacts, and safety risk were then applied on the blends and compared to fuel economy using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology to select the best product. The range of each metric varies from one to another depending on the nature of the metrics, applications, regulations etc.; however, AHP is used for ranking purposes in the range of 0-100%.