WASTE ANALYSIS AND MINIMIZATION IN BATCH AND SEMIBATCH REACTOR OPERATION THROUGH DYNAMIC SIMULATION AND NEURAL NETWORKS

The growing importance of pollution prevention as a necessary environm ental protection strategy has increased the efforts to develop new met hodologies for solving environmental problems in the chemical process industry. The purpose of this work is to present an integrated methodo logy to compare the process waste generation for-different operation c onditions in batch reactors. The integrated methodology invokes two st eps: i)dynamic modeling and evaluation and ii)optimization of an objec tive function including environmental costs. The proposed system shows the evolution in time of the objective function that includes a new c ontamination index, which allows the simultaneous consideration of eco nomical and environmental aspects in the waste minimization procedure. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.