Читать книгу Profit Maximization Techniques for Operating Chemical Plants - Sandip K. Lahiri - Страница 23

Due to intense competition among chemical industries across the globe, it is now absolutely necessary to minimize the cost of equipment during the design phase. Equipment costs consist of the initial capital cost of the equipment and the operating costs of the equipment. Due to the availability of a faster computer, it is now feasible to design one million different design configurations for any equipment. It is important to choose the lowest cost equipment among those one million options, but one that also obeys all of the constraints of operation, safety, maintainability, etc. Hence, to survive in today's cut‐throat competition, it is necessary to put the minimization of equipment cost as the main design target and an optimization algorithm is required to search all feasible design configurations to arrive at a minimum cost design quickly. This gives rise to a new design methodology of process equipment. Earlier traditional design methodology, where cost is not considered as a design target during the design phase, no longer produces a competitive design. In this chapter, a new design methodology of a plate‐type distillation column is considered as a case study to show the essence of the new design methodology. This chapter evolves a strategy to optimize various tray geometric parameters, like tray diameter, hole diameter, fractional whole area, downcomer width, etc., and also decides on the optimum feed tray location based on the overall cost minimization concept by particle swarm optimization techniques.