Abstract
Due to increasingly stringent legal requirements and escalating environmental control costs, chemical industries have paid close attention to sustainable development without compromising their economic performance. Thus, chemical industries are in need of systematic tools to conduct sustainability assessments of their process/plant design. In order to avoid making costly retrofits at later stages, assessments during the preliminary design stage should be performed. In this paper, a systematic framework is presented for chemical processes at the preliminary design stage. Gross profit, Health Quotient Index (HQI), Inherent Safety Index (ISI) and the Waste Reduction (WAR) algorithm are used to assess the economic performance, health, safety and environmental impact of the process, respectively. The fuzzy optimization approach is used to analyse the trade-off among the four aspects simultaneously, as they often conflict with each other. Deviation between the solution obtained from mathematical optimization model and process simulator is determined to ensure the validity of the model. To demonstrate the proposed framework, a case study on 1, 4-butanediol production is presented.
Highlights
Process design is a core element in the field of chemical engineering
It is essential to note that the abovementioned evaluation methods focus only on assessing the performance of a process design based on just one aspect and not addressing them simultaneously
This paper presents a systematic framework which combines the benefits from both process simulation and multi-objective optimization to address economic, environmental, health and safety aspects simultaneously at the preliminary design stage
Summary
Process design is a core element in the field of chemical engineering. It can be considered a centre point, bringing together all chemical engineering components as a whole. An integral part of process design is process synthesis. The field of process synthesis has seen significant developments since its inception in the 1960s led by the late Roger W. Nishida et al [3] provided an important overview of developments within the boundary of process synthesis and defined process synthesis as “an act of determining the optimal interconnection of processing units as well as the optimal type. Model [4] was as a proposed a systematic overview guide to process synthesis. Onion model systematic overview and guide to process synthesis thinking. In the late 80s [6]
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