Location-dependent optimal biorefinery synthesis

In this paper, we present an extended framework for synthesis of biorefinery networks. The extension of the framework responds to the needs of: automatically generating problem-specific superstructures from an in-house database in an efficient and reliable way, as well as obtaining and analysing sets of optimal and near-optimal location-dependent solutions enabling the consideration of specific criteria in the final selection. The extended framework is presented in detail, followed by an application example of ethanol production from various biomass sources. The results show the ability of the extended framework to retrieve a superstructure from the database based on a problem definition as well as to produce a set of top-ranked solutions (alternative process structures, location and feedstock selection) to be further analysed.