Industrial best practices of conceptual process design

Abstract

The chemical process industry aims particularly at energy, capital expenditure and variable feedstock cost savings due to fierce global competition, the Kyoto Protocol and requirements for sustainable development.Increasingly conceptual process design methods are used in the industry to achieve these aims. They are used in:• existing processes to renew parts;• process re-designs based on existing feedstocks and catalysts;• innovative processes (new feed stocks, new catalysts, new process routes, new multifunctional equipment).This article is focused on the best industrial conceptual design practices applied for these application areas. To this end we have reviewed methods, which are used in the chemical process industry in the last 15 years. Capital, energy and variable cost savings are indicated for each method.Specific attention is paid to:• functional integration to multi-functional equipment;• heuristic based selection of unit operations and recycle structure;• superstructure based design optimisation with mixed-integer-non-linear programming (MINLP).

Nanotechnology for Chemical Engineers

“…At the beginning of the twenty-first century, chemical engineers have involved in a diverse range of industries requiring a wide domain of knowledge in different areas (Elnashaie and Garhyan 2003). Current challenges in the fields of health, safety and environmental protection, together with the fast expansion in the use of sophisticated instruments, make the task even more difficult (Elnashaie and Garhyan 2003;Harmsen 2004;Martin et al 2005). At the same time, the need for the expertise of the chemical engineers greatly expanded with advancing production skills from commodity chemicals through pharmaceuticals, food processing, environmental protection, to extraterrestrial resource conservation and utilization, especially the provision of functional materials, for instance, for the information technology (IT) industry including device making, e.g., via chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-thus providing additional impetus for extending the chemical engineering knowledge base (Kwauk 2005;Chow 2002).…”

Reactive distillation: The front-runner of industrial process intensification

“…Present reactive distillation applications in general are showing large savings in capital cost and energy over conventional set-ups between 15 and 80% [3,6,7,[10][11][12]. Moreover, industrial presenters often mention the higher reliability of the system, due to less rotating equipment in particular and due to less equipment in general, requiring less maintenance.…”

Process Design, Integration and Optimisation: Advantages, Challenges and Drivers

“…An industrial process, aimed at producing, both sustainably and economically, some valuable end-products -and, simultaneously, by-products which can be used in other processes -should, when possible, take some important steps in its journey from cradle-to-grave (Harmsen, 2004): chemical processes synthesis, conceptual/systematic process design/synthesis, process development, process engineering, process and/or site integration, detailed engineering, plant operation and, fi nally, end of life.…”

“…Yet industry is still reluctant to fully embrace this trend, due to the lack of well-established procedures, the huge complexity and the diffi culty in interpreting the optimisation results (Harmsen, 2004).…”