Simulation-Based Process Design and Integration for the Sustainable Retrofit of Chemical Processes

Abstract

This research proposes a novel Retrofit Design Approach based on process simulation and the Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The approach comprises a diagnosis stage to select the promising variables through a sensitivity analysis, an evaluation stage to assess the impact of the promising variables, and to identify the most important factors through RSM. A reduced model from the process response behavior is built, and an optimization is carried out with the reduced model to identify optimal conditions and performance of the system, subject to objective function and model constraints. All these procedures are simulation-supported. The main advantage of the proposed approach is to handle a large industrial-scale design problem within a reasonable computational effort and to obtain a reduced model based on the most important factors. Limitations for the developed method include that the global optimality of the solutions found is not fully guaranteed, while large computational time for simulation may be r...