| In this work the preliminary design of batch/semicontinuous processes for both single product and multiproduct plants was studied. The design problem consists of two components: the equipment sizing and the network synthesis.;In the equipment sizing, an efficient heuristic sizing procedure, which determines the sizes of the batch and semicontinuous units as well as the number of units in parallel at each stage was presented. The sizing procedure can accommodate both new plant design as well as some simple forms of retrofitting applications. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with comparisons to designs obtained using nonlinear programming formulations solved by a generalized reduced gradient algorithm.;In the network synthesis, a set of synthesis rules, which serve to select structural features such as consecutive tasks that should be merged or split and tasks that should be separated by intermediate storage, was proposed.;The methodology developed in the equipment sizing and network synthesis was incorporated in an overall design strategy and a case study was used to illustrate the overall design procedure. |
