학술논문

Supporting chemical process design under uncertainty
Document Type
article
Source
Brazilian Journal of Chemical Engineering. September 2010 27(3)
Subject
Chemical process design
Process modeling
Simulation and optimization
Uncertainty
Process performance measures
Convergence
Process Simulators
Language
English
ISSN
0104-6632
Abstract
A major challenge in chemical process design is to make design decisions based on partly incomplete or imperfect design input data. Still, process engineers are expected to design safe, dependable and cost-efficient processes under these conditions. The complexity of typical process models limits intuitive engineering estimates to judge the impact of uncertain parameters on the proposed design. In this work, an approach to quantify the effect of uncertainty on a process design in order to enhance comparisons among different designs is presented. To facilitate automation, a novel relaxation-based heuristic to differentiate between numerical and physical infeasibility when simulations do not converge is introduced. It is shown how this methodology yields more details about limitations of a studied process design.