DESIGN OF STANDARDIZED, MODULAR, CHEMICAL PROCESSES

Process system manufacturers face a dilemma in designing new products. There are economic trade-offs between the two extremes of providing a customized design for each application, and providing only a few stan dardized designs. To solve this problem, we must have knowledge of pro cess design and the customers. We are integrating superstructure optim ization through MINLPs for the optimal design with knowledge of the di stribution of the customers in a ''requirement'' space. A master mathe matical program is being developed to link together this information t o solve the overall question of how to most economically provide stand ardized designs for the customers. An example is presented with our fo rmulation, along with the results of an enumerative solution.