The rising cost of energy and environmental concerns have led the brewing industry to search for techniques of reducing energy consumption in brewery operations. In this paper, pinch analysis was applied to a typical Ugandan based brewery process to target for the energy requirements of the process. Hint software was used for the analysis. At the chosen ΔTmin of 10˚C, the minimum cooling and heating utility requirements of the brewery studied were determined as being 4862.21 kW and 8294.21 kW respectively, with a pinch temperature at 68˚C. It was observed that using the technique, 1806.59 kW of energy could be recovered through process to process heat exchange which presented an energy saving potential of 21.5%. It is recommended that results from this study could be used in the design or retrofit of a heat exchanger network of a brewery for improved energy efficiency. Considerations can also be made for other values of ΔTmin.

This paper presents the modeling and simulation of a suspension polymerization for methyl methacrylate in an isothermal reactor to produce poly methyl methacrylate using Python 3.5. The numeral solution to the stiff ordinary differential equations was performed by building a custom module which was used with the inbuilt NumPy and matplotlib modules that come with the Anaconda python distro. Python was used in order to obtain a realistic solution that considers the gel, glass and cage effects that affect the non-linear polymerization kinetics established in literature. The results showed that a maximum monomer conversion of about 92.8% at a minimum batch time of about 2.2 hours could be achieved at the specified conditions to obtain a polydisperse polymer with an index of 27. It is further concluded that Python can be employed to perform similar studies with equal success as any other programming language.