SYNTHESIS OF OPTIMAL CHEMICAL REACTOR NETWORKS

The reactor is the most influential unit operation in many chemical pr ocesses. Reaction systems and reactor design often determine the chara cter of the flowsheet. However, research in reactor network synthesis has met with limited success because of nonlinear reaction models, unc ertain rate laws, and numerous possible reactor types and networks. In this paper we take advantage of attainable-region properties derived from geometric targeting techniques to design a concise reactor module for reactor network synthesis. The reactor module is made up of a con tinuous stirred tank reactor and a plug flow reactor (for two dimensio nal targeting) or a differential sidestream reactor (for higher dimens ions). These modules are used to synthesize the optimal reactor networ k target with respect to a specific objective function, and the proble m is formulated as a compact mixed integer nonlinear program. This new algorithm overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing algorithms. Fin ally, we solve several example problems to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm and discuss applications to simultaneous rea ctor network and process synthesis.