| dc.description.abstract | Today's chemical process industry is faced with pressing challenges to sustain the increasingly competitive global market with rising concerns on energy, water, food, and environment. Process intensification (PI) offers the potential to address these challenges by realizing step changes in process economics, energy efficiency, and environmental impacts through the development of novel process schemes and equipment. However, early PI breakthroughs mostly relied on Edisonian efforts while lack of theoretic development driving for systematic innovation. Meanwhile, PI technologies bring new challenges such as task-integrated design, new operating conditions, vulnerability to disturbance, etc. Thus, advanced computational and systems-based methods are essential means to support the analysis and optimization of PI systems at the early design stage.
In this thesis, we aim to address two key open questions for computer-aided PI: (i) how to systematically generate innovative and intensified process systems? and (ii) how to ensure that the derived intensified designs are operable under varying operating conditions? To answer the first question, we propose a PI synthesis strategy based on the Generalized Modular Representation Framework. A superstructure representation is developed to model chemical processes leveraging modular phenomenological building blocks (i.e., pure heat exchange module, mass/heat exchange module). Novel process structures can be systematically identified to enhance process performance without pre-postulation of equipment design. The proposed approach is further integrated with model-based operability strategies towards a holistic framework for the synthesis of operable process intensification systems. The following operability aspects are investigated with design optimization: (i) multiperiod process synthesis with flexibility considerations to generate design solution with guaranteed feasibility under uncertainty, (ii) inherently safer design by integrating risk analysis metrics as process constraints, and (iii) simultaneous design and control to deliver optimal design with optimal control actions. The applicability and versatility of the framework are demonstrated with a number of real-world applications to deliver intensified operable process systems, e.g. reactive separation, extractive separation with novel materials, dividing wall columns. | en |
