Flexibility and environmental assessment of process-intensified design solutions: A DWC case study

Abstract

During the last decades, energy and process integration have become the most spread practices to optimize chemical processes both from economic and environmental perspectives. While the design of the integrated and conventional configurations are usually compared by referring to nominal operating conditions, assessing the implications of process integration on system flexibility could be of critical importance, especially when considering the uncertain nature of renewables. This paper aims then at the comparison of different integrated and conventional unit design performances under uncertain conditions by means of a biorefinery Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol separation case study. An indirect distillation train and different configurations of Dividing Wall Column have been designed and compared to assess the environmental and economic advantages for different flexibility ranges. The proposed methodology allows to select the most suitable configuration for the required performance and to have more conscious expectations about investment costs and emissions when flexibility is taken into account.