(334q) Modeling and Optimization Approaches for Process Development

I am a 5^th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Chemical Engineering department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After defending in the next year, I hope to pursue a career in industry focused on modeling and optimization for process operation and design. My Ph.D. work as a member of the Process Systems Engineering Laboratory has involved both developing new numerical approaches and applying them to real systems. In particular, I have been collaborating with OCP’s phosphate-processing facility in Morocco to ensure that these tools can be effectively used to direct innovation in an industrial setting. I have enjoyed the opportunity to use modeling and optimization to develop specific methods to make concrete improvements, and I hope to also have these qualities in my future career. I am particularly interested in bringing my expertise in method development to create new tools that can address traditionally challenging systems that are too complex for current approaches to handle.

Ph.D. Work:

The focus of my Ph.D. research has been using recent advances in nonsmooth equation solving to develop new methods for modeling complex chemical systems. Many processes in chemical engineering, including phase changes and batch or semi-batch manufacturing, transition between different regions, making them naturally nonsmooth. Traditionally, these processes are modeled using disjunctive or mixed-integer programs that are often nonlinear and scale poorly with system size. Instead, I have proposed simulating these systems using compact, explicitly-nonsmooth equations, which, unlike current approaches, requires only equation-solving methods, scales well with system size, and can solve for any unknown process variable. In particular, I have been collaborating with OCP to apply this approach to improve process integration and reduce resource use at their Jorf Lasfar platform. Throughout this project, I have developed and implemented process models for the major units at Jorf Lasfar using a combination of fundamental relations and empirical plant data. I have also performed analyses to identify areas with the most potential for improvement in resource use, utilized new research developments to create numerical methods tailored to simplifying this problem, and applied these methods to propose specific process designs for the sustainable expansion of Jorf Lasfar. I am currently working on developing nonsmooth optimization methods to minimize the costs of these designs by adapting global optimization algorithms. In the future, I hope to be able to continue applying these skills for process design and method development to help tackle key problems across chemical processes.