Computer-aided design of optimal environmentally benign solvent-based adhesive products

The manufacture of improved adhesive products that meet specified target properties has attracted increasing interest over the last decades. In this work, a general systematic methodology for the design of optimal adhesive products with low environmental impact is presented. The proposed approach integrates computer-aided design tools and Generalised Disjunctive Programming (GDP), a logic-based framework, to formulate and solve the product design problem. Key design decisions in product design (i.e., how many components should be included in the final product, which active ingredients and solvent compounds should be used and in what proportions) are optimised simultaneously. This methodology is applied to the design of solvent-based acrylic adhesives, which are commonly used in construction. First, optimal product formulations are determined with the aim to minimize toxicity. This reveals that number of components in the product formulation does not correlate with performance and that high performance can be achieved by investigating different number of components as well as by optimising all ingredients simultaneously rather than sequentially. The relation between two competing objectives (product toxicity and concentration of the active ingredient) is then explored by obtaining a set of Pareto optimal solutions. This leads to significant trade-offs and large areas of discontinuity driven by discrete changes in the list of optimal ingredients in the product