Читать книгу Profit Maximization Techniques for Operating Chemical Plants - Sandip K. Lahiri - Страница 28

There are a million ways to increase profit. Leading refineries, petrochemicals, and chemical companies around the world have developed some best practices on their journeys for continuous improvement. These best practices are not confined to some process area and discipline, but are in diverse fields. The author has visited many fortune 500 chemical companies around the world and collected a list of these best practices. Due to brevity, only some of the high‐impact best practices are shared here. Leading chemical companies had discovered these best practices as part of their learning experience spanning over decades. When they implemented these best practices in their plants, they found huge profit improvements. Chapter 17 gives an overview of 150 best practices followed by leading process industries around the world. All of the best practices discussed here are implemented and followed by some of the leading companies.

The practicing process engineers or production engineers working in chemical plants normally have much less exposure or knowledge to implement a site‐wide holistic profit maximization project. The available books on the market on chemical engineering and process engineering do not cover the practical aspects of how to increase profit in a running commercial chemical plant. The available books on chemical engineering optimization and energy improvement place emphasis on unnecessary theoretical details, which normally are not required by practicing engineers and those theories have very little relevance for commercial implementation of profit maximization in a running plant. Most of the books cover theoretical aspects and unnecessary detailed calculations mainly for the design of process equipment. Few books address optimization in chemical plants as their focus is on development of a superior theoretical optimization algorithm and completely ignore the real‐life application side. Every CEO in chemical plants understands that profit maximization in running a chemical plant is a vast subject and should be tackled holistically. There are various ways and means with varying degrees of usefulness to increase profit in operating plants. Profit can be increased by reducing waste, by optimizing processes, by increasing equipment performance, by improving reaction selectivity/yield/efficiency, by reducing raw material and utility consumption, by pushing the process towards its constraints, by running the plants at the highest possible capacity, by installing low‐cost high‐efficacy equipment, etc. Most of the available books cover the whole subject only partially. Some books cover energy optimization, some deal with waste minimization, and some introduce low‐cost design of equipment. However, no book is available on the market to cover the whole gamut of the subject holistically and in this context this will be the first such book. It provides engineers with all practical aspects of the profit maximization project in running plants, as well as expert guidance on how to derive maximum benefits from running the plants.

Clearly, it was not a small effort to write the book, but the absence of such a practical oriented book on the market and its requirement in a large number of process industries spurred me to writing it. I had an opportunity to work with leading petrochemical plants across the globe in the last 28 years was fortunate to see a wide spectrum of profit improvement initiatives taken by various fortune 500 companies. I have tried to incorporate all my learning and global experience in this book. I would like to thank Mr Mansoor Husain of M/s Scientific Design, USA, for teaching and exposing me to the practical field of profit improvement.

Finally, I am truly grateful to my family, my wife Jinia and my two lovely children Suchetona and Srijon, for their understanding and generosity of spirit in tolerating my absence during the writing of this book.

Dr Sandip Kumar Lahiri

January, 2020