Hybrid Method/Tool for Sustainable Process Synthesis, Design, Analysis, and Improvement
Abstract Due to increased concerns regarding environment, public health and safety through regulatory enforcements and growing competitiveness through globalization, there is an incentive and a quest for innovative designs that are efficient, profitable as well as sustainable. To generate a truly optimal process flowsheet a systematic method to identify the types of tasks-operations that need to be performed, the corresponding design of the operation-equipment, their configuration, mass-energy flows, environmental impacts, etc., need to be employed. In this case, development and use of a hybrid method that combines the best features of knowledge-based and optimization-based approaches into one method is an attractive option. This work focuses on the development of an integrated method and computer aided software tool capable of enumerating all feasible alternatives within the entire search space defined by a process synthesis problem. Solving this type of large and complex synthesis problems using mathematical formulations is usually cumbersome and difficult. In this work we integrated ProCAFD (computer-aided synthesis tool used for enumeration) with Super-O, which automates the mathematical formulation of the synthesis problem thereby leading to very quick and reliable solutions. An overview of the key concepts and the method is presented along with details of the developed computer-aided tool.