Dr. Ashish M. Gujarathi

Evolutionary Optimization in Process Industries: Challenges, Advances, Perspectives and Applications

Abstract:

To fulfill the desire of process engineers and business decision-makers, it is important to operate the process industries optimally to improve the efficiency, improving the energy-saving potential, reducing the plant operating cost as well as environmental pollution ensuring the process safety of the entire plant operation. Due to the involvement of conflicting objectives, i.e., the process criteria, process safety, environmental and profit, chemical processes are perfect contender for multi-objective optimization and analysis. In this talk, two important real world processes, namely Natural Gas Sweetening and Dehydration processes are analyzed using the multi-criteria perspectives. In Oil & Gas industry, gas sweetening process is inevitable when raw natural gas contains acid gases like H2S and CO2. Removal of these acid gases is important from the green future perspective and is essential since their presence poses severe corrosion problem to the downstream process lines and equipment. The %CO2 removal and %H2S removal for process objectives, damage index for process safety, profit before tax, return on investment for economic, global warming potential, acidification potential for environmental objectives are used to analyses multi-criteria optimization scenarios. Energy-saving potential and profitability of the operating plant have also been highlighted under normal and deteriorating feed conditions for the desired sweet gas purity and process safety. Process retrofitting aspects are introduced and the performance of retrofitted based multi-criteria analysis is compared with base case processes. Importance and challenges of complex industrial processes towards conflicting criteria are discussed.