(732t) Towards a Software Prototype for Synthesis of Operable Process Intensification Systems

"Process Intensification (PI) is an extensively used strategy to improve the sustainability and energy efficiency of chemical processes while also lowering the overall cost of production (Moulijn et al., 2008). There has been a burgeoning interest in PI among the process systems community as evidenced through the development of new technologies and methodologies in academia and industry alike (Tian et al., 2018). However, research towards creating software tools to leverage the state-of-the-art tools is still lacking. Driven by the recent national initiatives, such as RAPID Institute (Bielenberg and Palou-Rivera, 2019), several projects have been actuated to offer computer-aided development and analysis of PI systems (Tula et al. (2017); Demirel et al. (2017); Miller et al. (2018)).

In this work, we present an initial attempt towards a software prototype housing bespoke suites for holistic and targeted development of PI flowsheets (Vedant et al., 2021). The platform consists of three major suites: (i) Synthesis Suite - to enable discovery of novel and intensified processes, without prepostulation of potential unit operations or equipment, through phenomenon-based flowsheet generation (Papalexandri and Pistikopoulos, 1996); (ii) Model Library - to house numerous models that can be implemented within the prototype for synthesis, validation, and operability analysis of PI systems; (iii) Operability Suite - to enable dynamic optimization of PI systems and provide advanced model-predictive control strategies for online implementation (Pistikopoulos et al.,2015). A Python-based user interface (UI) is developed to seamlessly implement the integrated generation of PI flowsheets. Furthermore, a case study on pentene metathesis is presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the platform for deploying safe and operable PI systems.

Keywords: Process Intensification, Process Synthesis, Process Operability, Software Prototype

References

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