Synthesis of bioprocesses using physical properties data

The aim of this article is to illustrate and evaluate a synthesis procedure which has been extended to tackle bioprocesses. Physical property informat ion is used to screen candidate units thereby reducing the size of the synt hesis problem. In this way, only units which exploit large property differe nces between components in a stream are selected. This is important for bio processes because of the large number of components and wide range of unit operations which are available. The screening technique and bioprocess-unit -design methodologies have been incorporated within an implicit enumeration algorithm which was developed for chemical process synthesis and is implem ented in Java programming language. An important advantage is the ability o f the bioprocess synthesis software to generate a ranked list of flowsheets which may subsequently be analyzed in more detail. Two case studies are used to evaluate the bioprocess-synthesis technique. T he first system involves a product which is secreted from the host organism . The second has significantly different characteristics in that the produc t is intracellular and forms inclusion bodies. The latter case study, in pa rticular, is a large synthesis problem with 12 unit operations and 20 conta minant compounds. The results show that the synthesis methodology identifie s a set of economically optimal flowsheets in a reasonable computational ti me which demonstrates its ability to deal with large synthesis problems. Us ing the syn thesis methodology we can generate bioprocesses which are optim al in a system-wide, rather than unit-by-unit, sense. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.