Improved Ternary Diagram Approach for the Synthesis of a Resource Conservation Network with Multiple Properties. 2. Regeneration Reuse/Recycle

Abstract

Environmental sustainability, rising cost of raw materials, and increasingly stringent emission legislation have motivated process industries to search for resource conservation alternatives. Process integration has been proven to be an effective technique for the synthesis of resource conservation network (RCN). In this first part of the series, the earlier developed clustering technique and ternary diagram by El-Halwagi et al. (AIChE J. 2004, 50 (8), 1854–1869) are extended for the synthesis of RCN with multiple properties. An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is newly introduced to determine the quality ranking of the sources and sinks, which provides the basic information for the synthesis of RCN. In addition, the mean normalization approach (MNA) is proposed to normalize the property operators to avoid the possibility of the dimensionless property operators being in large magnitude difference when the property operators are divided by randomly selected reference values. Besides, the available region (...