Summary: Process Design
High-tech materials, agro-chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs are essential to provide sufficient food, good healthcare and useful goods to a growing world population.
The ultimate task of a process design methodology is to create the blueprint of a chemical process converting raw materials into these products. This blueprint is used in later design stages to engineer the process in detail.
In a changing world, the capability to respond to a changing environment becomes an additional criterion when designing a process. Various terms are used to describe this process feature – robustness, adaptability or even anti-fragility - to flexibly react on unexpected changes in product demand, feedstock, energy supply or legislative requirements. The new goal of process design is to create “no-regret”-solutions. These solutions are not the optimal design for a specific scenario,but perform best in all possible futures.
The design methodology starts with defining a set of Future Scenarios describing alternate product demand profiles, different feedstock and technological trends.
Process synthesis generates a set of different process structures. Process synthesis aims at gaining structural insights into the process and selecting a limited design structures.
In a next step Process Analysis studies these designs in greater detail. Simulation, targeting and benchmarking represent the main tools to value the various designs. These designs are finally evaluated against various future scenarios leading to an economic and robust initial design structure with optimized process parameters.
In a next design step this initial process design is further improved through process intensification and integration. Process Intensification focuses on better heat and mass transfer using superior, novel technologies. Process Integration searches for more efficient designs transferring heat and energy between different process sections.
Finally the capacity expansion strategy to flexibly supply product is studied comparing large-scale, tailor-made designs with a flexible, modular design approach in terms of Process Flexibility. Based on the future scenarios the optimal capacity expansion strategy is selected and the process structure and parameters are chosen.
This course illustrates the key elements of a design methodology leading to robust, economic and sustainable process designs. Various examples are used to demonstrate the different steps of process design.
You will find the course videos in German with this link: Vorlesungsvideos
