A Nonlinear Programming Approach To Conceptual Design Of Reaction-Separation Systems

The conceptual design of chemical processes is a challenging task. Although systematic methods for process design have been developed in the last 25 years, only a few contributions address the simultaneous design and optimization of reaction and separation. Promising process variants should be identified in an early design stage to narrow down the usually large number of variants and to shorten the effort and time for rigorous process design. In this paper, we present a nonlinear programming approach to the conceptual design of integrated reaction-separation systems using shortcut models for performance assessment. In contrast to commonly used simple reactor models, which, for example, restrict the achievable product composition to equilibrium compositions, the presented novel reactor shortcut enables an economical assessment of arbitrary reactor systems at the optimal point of operation. Furthermore, it is shown how the novel reactor shortcut is combined with available separator shortcuts to screen alternatives of combined reaction-separation processes.