(341i) Computer-Aided Tool for Fast, Efficient and Sustainable Process Flowsheet Design

Process synthesis and design are well-known concepts in the process development community. While process synthesis aims to find the optimal process flowsheets among numerous alternatives using known unit operations, process design aims to determine optimal values for the process variables in a given flowsheet subject to the same process and performance criteria. Currently, the aim is also to find sustainable process designs, that promote sustainable technologies through efficient use of resources in order to reduce or minimize energy usage, time, environmental impact and resource wastage, unnecessary costs, bottlenecks, and many more. The main difficulty is how to achieve the optimal processing route and associated process operation design, reliably, efficiently and systematically that are also novel and sustainable?

In this work, a computer-aided tool, ProCAFD (Tula et al 2019) is presented that employs a multi-scale framework and a suite of associated computer-aided tools, which helps to synthesize, design, analyze and innovate all feasible flowsheet process alternatives as well as to identify more sustainable alternatives. ProCAFD can generate all the process alternatives for a given problem and quickly screen them to find the best alternative through a process-groups based method as well as superstructure-based mathematical programming. It is also integrated with external simulators such as ICAS, ASPEN PLUS and Pro/II where the simulator input file is automatically created for any selected process flowsheet that has been generated. Based on the process simulation results, ProCAFD has a collection of integrated analysis tools for various types of analysis, such as economic, life cycle, sustainability and process safety to identify process bottlenecks. Based on the identified bottlenecks (process hotspots) targets for process improvement are defined and using another set of tools for process integration and intensification, new alternatives that match the targets for improvement are determined. The application of this computer-aided tool is illustrated through several case studies involving industrially important processes where in each case study ProCAFD is able to generate new and innovative solutions than the ones reported in the literature. The presentation will highlight new features, such as generation of alternatives through process integration and intensification, updated analysis tools, improved user-interface and links to external computer-aided tools.