Applications in Chemical Engineering

Abstract

Plenty of models in chemical engineering are known. In this chapter we selected 16 applications that present a large diversity of problems including: optimal design of chemical reactors, determination of molecular conformation of pseudoethane, optimal design of refrigeration systems, optimal operation of an alkylation unit, a phase and chemical equilibrium problem – van der Waals equation, pooling-blending with different feeds, pools and finite products, nonsharp separation, optimal control of a continuous stirred-tank chemical reactor, and optimal design of heat exchangers. For all these applications we present the mathematical model, the GAMS representation of it and the solution given by the solvers CONOPT, KNITRO, MINOS and SNOPT. We are interested in finding only the local optimal solution of these applications. These applications are taken from the literature, for example, Floudas and Pardalos (1990), Floudas et al. (1999), Dembo (1976), Ryoo and Sahinidis (1995), Schittkowski (1987), Andrei (2003), Aggarwal and Floudas (1990), and Lapidus and Luus (1967), etc.