Process Intensification using Building Blocks

Process intensification often requires innovative solutions to make drastic improvements. However, identification of optimal intensification schemes is not always an easy task, even at the conceptual design stage. The traditional paradigm of unit-operation-based process synthesis may not always be able to systematically identify novel intensification pathways. At the heart of this challenge remains the question of how one should represent chemical processes that would enable automatic generation and screening of novel intensification pathways without presupposing equipment and flowsheet alternatives. This article presents a method to identify intensification opportunities at the early design stage. It is based on a representation of chemical processes using abstract building blocks. These building blocks, depending on how they are constructed and how they interact with each other when arranged in a two-dimensional grid, give rise to different phenomena, tasks, and unit operations. This enables engineers to systematically identify traditional, as well as intensified and out-of-the-box, designs at the equipment and flowsheet levels.