Alternatives in the optimal allocation of intermediate storage tank in multiproduct batch plants

Optimal design of batch plants under economic and ecological considerations: Application to a biochemical batch plant

Integrating environmental impact minimization into batch plant design: Application to protein production

Incorporating scheduling in the optimal design of multiproduct batch plants

Design of a chemical batch plant: a study of dedicated parallel lines with intermediate storage and the plant performance

A system with several actors will increase the possibilities for collaboration and therefore, in many cases also increase the possibilities to affect the operation with economic and environmental benefits. In this paper a district heating system is studied with purpose to create economic and environmental operation guidelines in favour of the involved actors. The company LuleKraft owns a combined heat and power plant, while the four heating stations together with the DH network are owned by Luleå Energi. District heat is produced from the CHP plant and the four heating stations which are fired with process gases from an integrated steel plant, oil, wood pellets or electricity. The heat demand in the system is strongly depending on the outdoor temperature. In this paper, the system is modelled with Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming in order to optimise the profit and CO2 emission. A comparison between actual process data and modelled results is performed. A pareto front is derived to show the trade-off between economic benefits and CO2 emissions. It is found that the main suggestions, under conditions for optimised profit, are (1) to prioritize effective heat production instead of electricity production at cold outdoor temperatures and (2) redistribution of the accessible process gases between the CHP plant and one of the heating stations. This will lead to an improved operation strategy, resulting in increased profit and reduced energy consumption.

Synthesis and Design of Integrated Process and Water Networks

Network formulations for the design and scheduling of multiproduct batch plants with parallel lines

We propose a metaheuristics-based approach to the optimal design of multi-product batch plants, with a particular application example of chemical-engineering systems. Our hybrid approach combines two metaheuristics: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Simulated Annealing (SA). We develop a sequential implementation of the proposed method and we parallelize it on Graphics Processing Units (GPU) using the CUDA programming environment. We experimentally demonstrate that the results of our hybrid metaheuristic approach (ACO+SA) are very near to the global optimal solutions, but they are produced much faster than using the deterministic Branch-and-Bound approach.

Batch manufacturing plants require the frequent adaptation of production facilities to incorporate internal and external uncertainties. The introduction of flexibility in the design of general-purpose plants represents a cornerstone for the design and retrofit of batch processes along the plant’s lifecycle. Moreover, the integration of batch process development decisions during the plant design also contributes to handle uncertainty. This paper presents a novel optimization-based approach for the flexible design of batch plants by integrating process synthesis and plant allocation decisions, such as feed-forward control trajectories of processing conditions or the selection of operating modes and equipment items. To do so, a modeling strategy based on Mixed-Logic Dynamic Optimization and two-stage stochastic formulation is used to maximize the expected profit taking into account several uncertain scenarios. Moreover, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the resulting problem that is characterized by a great complexity, consisting of an iterative procedure with embedded deterministic solutions of the integrated problem. The proposed approach is illustrated through the design of a single-product batch plant to carry out a competitive reaction process.

The Design and Synthesis of Batch/Semicontinuous Processes

Synthesis of a non dispersive solvent extraction plant for effluent treatment and metal recovery

The problem of the design of a flexible batch process which consists of several batch stages and intermediate storage tanks is dealt with. The variations related to the operation schedule and to the batch size of each batch stage are considered as uncertain variations in the batch process. The quantitative relationship between the size of the variations and the necessary volume of the storage tank is derived. By use of this relationship, the design problem which makes not only every variation within a given range allowable but also minimizes the construction cost is mathematically formulated. When the cycle time or the batch size of each subprocess takes only discrete values, this design problem is effectively solved by applying the Dynamic Programming Approach.

Integration of sale and leaseback in the optimal design of supply chain networks

The increasing interest in multipurpose batch plants is evident, because of their inherent flexibility to cope with an ever changing market environment. These plants are easily reconfigured for product modifications, to cover a wide range of operating conditions. They are also suitable for producing different products within the same facility. In spite of this advantage, the design, synthesis, and scheduling of multipurpose batch plants can be a challenging task. This paper addresses design, synthesis, and scheduling simultaneously. It is known that the scheduling platform employed has a significant impact on the computational performance of the overall model in the design and synthesis of batch plants. The recent scheduling model that results in better computational efficiencies is extended to incorporate design and synthesis. Computational studies are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. A comparison with earlier formulations showed that better computational times and objective functions were obtained by this work.

Integrated batch plant design: A polymer plant case study