| dc.description.abstract | As the global population reached more than 7.7 billion, the needs for better living conditions and industrialization have grown rapidly all over the world. As the result, the consumption of natural resources has risen dramatically. With such increasing demands of resources, such as water and energy, it is significant for us to ensure safe, continuous, and efficient supplies to meet the demands.
During the chemical production, transportation, and material allocation processes, process integration and optimization has been approved to be a useful method and tool for resource conservation and recovery. Unused materials could be recycled, and energy produced could be reapplied to the system. However, a highly integrated and optimized process usually results in a complex system with a large number of connections for materials and energy exchange. A minor incident could cause a decrease in production rate or a complete shutdown of the system. Thus, safety and reliability studies are the key to develop such a complicated production infrastructure.
This work focuses on providing insight and a methodology of combining process safety and reliability analysis with the current process integration and optimization techniques. The approach proposed in this work will include identifying potential issues within an integrated system, quantifying interested process specifications, such as reliability, safety, and cost, developing a systematic approach to include different variables into the existing optimization frameworks, and solving the integration and optimization problems. This work includes three major topics that involve system synthesis, unit operation, and material allocation. First, we developed a systematic approach to analyze unit and system reliability for direct water recycle network and then integrate the reliability analysis into the optimization framework to study its effect on overall water recycle system design and operation. Besides, we also studied how different pretreatment technologies can improve the reliability of a reverse osmosis water treatment unit. Techno-economic analyses were performed on all pretreatment technologies and were compared to the saving from extended cleaning and replacing schedules of the RO membrane. In addition, we applied data analysis techniques to quantify hazardous material transportation risk and then integrated the data-based safety variable into the supply chain material allocation problem to see how transportation decisions could be differed by different system risk value. The results of this work demonstrate the significance of safety and reliability in an integrated process and how other variables could change based on different requirements for the newly added variables. For future works, it is possible to extend this study by proposing a standard methodology for identifying and quantifying additional variables, such as environmental impacts, and by developing a systematic approach to analyze the effect of these variables on the existing integration and optimization frameworks. | en |
