INTEGRATED DESIGN OF RESPONSIVE CHEMICAL MANUFACTURING FACILITIES

Recent economic, safety, logistic and environmental trends within the process industries are encouraging research into the design and operat ion of distributed chemical manufacturing facilities. A highly desirab le feature of the distributed plant is to deliver product meeting the specification on demand (instant response). Taking the distributed pla nt as a motivation an integrated design approach for responsive plants has been developed. A two stage strategy has been proposed. First, a process structure capable of fulfilling the instant response criterion is developed. A dynamic optimisation, formulated with an economic obj ective, then determines the optimal operating cycle for this design. T he approach has been successfully applied to a reactor network case st udy.