A HEURISTIC APPROACH FOR THE DESIGN OF HYBRID BATCH-CONTINUOUS PROCESSES

This paper presents a procedure for the selection of batch or continuo us type stages in single product chemical processes, highlighting the effects of the production rate. Batch designs allow the merging of con formable tasks (reactions or separations) in single units, and this be comes attractive economically for small size equipment for which the e conomy of scale is stronger. The procedure is heuristic, and consists of a sequence of decisions that reduces the number of alternatives to be searched to find a good design. At each step of the search, more co mpact batch designs are considered (designs with a smaller number of s tages). The unconstrained optimization of all batch alternatives over the process decision variables, provides information which can be used to eliminate many alternatives and point out attractive mergings. The procedure is illustrated for a process to produce butadiene sulfone.