A FUNCTIONAL-APPROACH TO PROCESS SYNTHESIS AND ITS APPLICATION TO DISTILLATION SYSTEMS

Following Douglas's philosophy of a target-directed hierarchical appro ach to process design, we propose a general framework for systematic i mplicit enumeration and evaluation of feasible designs, with successiv e model refinement leading to a final detailed design. The process is represented by a state-task-network, and feasible networks are generat ed by assigning a purpose, or function, to each elementary task. The a pproach is applied to the synthesis of both simple and complex distill ation systems, and two examples of homogeneous azeotropic systems are treated in some detail. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.