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HOMEWORK 2 Process Synthesis

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Alexia Olvera
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25 views2 pages

HOMEWORK 2 Process Synthesis

Uploaded by

Alexia Olvera
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Process Systems Engineering — The Way Ahead

Essay by Alexia Olvera


In today’s environment, there are major changes occurring in the process
industries, the increasing global warming, the changes in the world economic and
the advances in technology have created new problems, new opportunities, and
new markets. Tighter environmental constraints and tighter requirements for
hygiene, health and safety on the plant mean that processes must be more closely
monitored and controlled. There is a notable increase in food processing and
packaging and in the development of "prepared foods" with an ever-expanding
range of additives to improve texture, flavor and shelf life. They are usually
manufactured in batch or semi-continuous, and subsequent weighing and
packaging operations add more difficulty to the production process.
The process started in the early sixties, when the first steps were taken towards on
integrated approach to design with the development of flowsheeting packages.
Originally, these were merely concerned with steady state simulation, but it was not
long before their scope was extended to deal with steady state design. At the same
time, engineers in industry were concerned with linking process design to
downstream design activities — equipment design, plant layout, pipework design,
instrumentation etc. In the late seventies, the emphasis shifted towards a broader
view of design objectives, a recognition that plants must be designed to operate
satisfactorily over a range of conditions.
With the recession in the process industries in the early eighties, and the resulting
fall in demand for new plants, the emphasis shifted even more to efficient operation
and use of existing plant, and their extension and adaptation by retrofitting. As
techniques and hardware have improved, so management have become more
confident in the use of more sophisticated control, in on—line optimization, and in
the upwards extension of computer—based techniques into the higher levels of
operations management.
There is now a huge international activity across the whole range of process
systems engineering, and a comprehensive survey is quite impracticable. What
follows therefore is a personal account of recent problems, ideas and
developments that I have come across and found to be particularly interesting or
significant.
It can be argued that detailed modelling of individual units or processes, with the
associated experimental studies, is a matter for chemists, physicists and chemical
engineers, and that the process systems engineer is concerned only with the use
of models in design, control, operations planning, etc. Some might go a little
further, and admit to an interest in the general methodology of modelling, such as
statistical parameter fitting, the design of experiments for optimum parameter
determination or model discrimination, and model reduction techniques.
However, the methodology and the individual studies are inextricably mixed, and it
is impossible to carry out the one without an understanding of the other. Indeed, I
would go further, and claim that the modelling process is nowadays the essential
route by which we acquire our understanding of the physical and chemical
processes we study. We first analyse the process into component mechanisms
which are fully understood, and hence for which we already have adequate
models, and then ensure that their interconnections are correctly represented in
the model. We are then in a position to simulate the behaviour of the complete
system and compare the results with experiment; significant discrepancies
will lead us back to a reexamination of the elementary mechanisms, or of the
modelling of their interactions.
Thus process systems engineering is not a specialized area for mathematically
minded chemical engineers — it is the very core of the discipline of chemical
engineering itself.

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