DESIGN AND CONTROL OF A COMPLEX PROCESS INVOLVING 2 REACTION STEPS, 3 DISTILLATION-COLUMNS, AND 2 RECYCLE STREAMS

This work examines the plantwide design and control of a complex process typical of many industrial chemical operations. The plant contains two reaction steps, three distillation columns, two recycle streams, and six chemical components. Two methods, a heuristic design procedure and a nonlinear optimization, have been used to determine an approximate economically optimal steady-state design. The designs differ substantially in terms of the purities and flow rates of the recycle streams. The total annual cost of the nonlinear optimization design is about 20% less than the cost of the heuristic design. An analysis has also been done to examine the sensitivity to design parameters and specifications. Two effective control strategies have been developed using guidelines from previous plantwide control studies; both require reactor composition control as well as flow control of a stream somewhere in each recycle loop. Several alternative control strategies that might initially have seemed obvious do not work. This process has important features that fundamentally determine its operability, including the balance of the two reaction steps and the inventory regulation of intermediate species.