Читать книгу Profit Maximization Techniques for Operating Chemical Plants - Sandip K. Lahiri - Страница 66

Before building a PMP application for a process, the concerned chemical engineer must understand all the relevant aspects of the process, its various limitations, how it makes profit, and what area can be exploited to increase profit. As a starting step, the PMP engineer usually surveys PFDs and P&IDs of the process under study, meets with operations engineers and a specialized work force, and finds all the opportunities and constraints to increase profit in a plant. In this step the PMP engineer usually assesses the current operation, analyzes historical data, understands the various safety and process constraints and equipment limitations, etc. A functional design aims to identify all the existing opportunities to increase the plant profit (Lahiri, 2017c). In this step, the PMP engineer formulates various profit improvement strategies and identifies all potential applications where application of data analytics and modeling and optimization techniques can be applied to improve profit. A preliminary feasibility study is undertaken to identify whether an APC application can be implemented. In this step, an overall idea and forward path is made regarding which PMP application will be used and where to tap into the profit increase opportunity. A functional design step basically provides a map of every opportunity and which methods will be used to exploit a particular opportunity. The success of the profit maximization will greatly depend on how the functional design is formulated in order to tap into the potential margins available in the process. This step requires synergy between expertise and experience of the domain engineer or plant process engineer and the PMP engineer.