Continuous process improvement is a critical element in maintaining competitiveness of
the process industries. An important category of process improvement is process
debottlenecking which is associated with plants that have sold-out products while
making a profit. In such cases, market conditions and the prospects for enhancing
revenues and profits drive the process to increase production.
To overcome the limitation of conventional sequential unit-by-unit
debottlenecking approach, this work introduces a new approach. This new approach is
simultaneous in nature and is based on posing the debottlenecking task as a process
integration task which links all the design and operating degrees of freedom and exploits
synergies among the units and streams to attain maximum debottlenecking. Additionally,
this new approach considers heat integration of the process while simultaneously
performing the debottlenecking. Because of the general nonconvexity of the process
model, a rigorous interval-based bounding technique is used to determine the target for
maximum extent of debottlenecking aside from the problem nonconvexity. Inclusion isotonicity using interval arithmetic is used to determine a global bound for the
maximum extent of process debottlenecking. Focus is given to no/low cost
debottlenecking such as modest changes in design and operating degrees of freedom.
Two case studies are solved to illustrate the applicability of the new approach and its
superior results compared to the conventional sequential approach.
Intensification, to debottleneck a process and to improve process safety is also
addressed in this work. A new definition and classification of intensification is
introduced. This classification distinguishes between two types of intensification: single
unit and whole process. Process integration and optimization techniques are used to
develop a systematic procedure for process intensification. Focus is given to the
interaction among the process units while enhancing the intensification of the process. A
case study is solved to illustrate the usefulness of the developed approach.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2456 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Al Thubaiti, Musaed Muhammad |
| Contributors | El-Halwagi, Mahmoud |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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