Abstract
The chemical industry has to deal with increasing uncertainties regarding the boundary conditions of their production processes. On the one hand, uncertainties affect the availability, quality, and prizes of raw material and energy. On the other hand, the demand side is affected by increasing volatilities in product demand and increasing requirements for product variety. These changing boundary conditions lead to higher needs for flexibility in production processes of the chemical industry. Within this article technical solutions for an enhancement of different forms of flexibility are presented for production concepts and apparatus concepts, respectively. The latter focuses on unit operations for the separation of gas–liquid mixtures. This includes a review regarding transformable, modular production processes and a classification of their field of application. Additionally, concepts for named unit operations on different scales are presented and discussed. The presented concepts are also classified with respect to the different types of flexibility.
Highlights
The chemical industry is facing diverse challenges to conduct a profitable production of chemicals along the value of chain
A successful operation of a modular plant is depending on suitable apparatuses
Production in the chemical industry is facing new challenges regarding uncertainties in the supply and costs of raw material and energy, as well as increasing needs for product variety and overall demand volatility. This results in new requirements regarding the flexibility of production processes to meet these challenges in terms of capacity, products, and location
Summary
The chemical industry is facing diverse challenges to conduct a profitable production of chemicals along the value of chain. Uncertainties in amount and type of raw material are only relevant for energy intensive processes at the beginning of the value chain usually performed in large-scale continuous plants. For some of the mentioned challenges there are solutions on hand or under research [27,28,29] These solutions deal with market volatilities by sequential investments that have to be carried out with multiproduct continuous production which efficiently serve the supply chain and lower investment risks [30,31,32,33] in smart factories [34]. Plant flexibility is a key issue in this context [35,36,37] The impact of these potential small-scale production solutions on investment costs has to be low in order to overcome economies of scale [38,39,40,41,42]. Within this article, a differentiation between small-scale, technical-scale, and large-scale is carried out representing the above mentioned evaluation of plant size along the value chain
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