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Process engineering is the understanding and application of the fundamental principles and laws of nature that allow humans to transform raw material and energy into products that are useful to society, at an industrial level. By taking advantage of the driving forces of nature such as pressure, temperature and concentration gradients, as well as the law of conservation of mass, process engineers can develop methods to synthesize and purify large quantities of desired chemical products. Process engineering focuses on the design, operation, control, optimization and intensification of chemical, physical, and biological processes. Process engineering encompasses a vast range of industries, such as agriculture, automotive, biotechnical, chemical, food, material development, mining, nuclear, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and software development. The application of systematic computer-based methods to process engineering is "process systems engineering".
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- A holistic approach to process design which emphasizes the unity of the process and considers the interactions between different unit operations from the outset, rather than optimising them separately. This can also be called integrated process design or process synthesis. El-Halwagi and Smith (2005) describe the approach well. An important first step is often product design which develops the specification for the product to fulfil its required purpose.
- Pinch analysis, a technique for designing a process to minimise energy consumption and maximise heat recovery, also known as heat integration, energy integration or pinch technology. The technique calculates thermodynamically attainable energy targets for a given process and identifies how to achieve them. A key insight is the pinch temperature, which is the most constrained point in the process. The most detailed explanation of the techniques is by Linnhoff et al. (1982), Shenoy (1995), Kemp (2006) and Kemp and Lim (2020), and it also features strongly in Smith (2005). This definition reflects the fact that the first major success for process integration was the thermal pinch analysis addressing energy problems and pioneered by Linnhoff and co-workers. Later, other pinch analyses were developed for several applications such as mass-exchange networks, water minimization, and material recycle. A very successful extension was "Hydrogen Pinch", which was applied to refinery hydrogen management. This allowed refiners to minimise the capital and operating costs of hydrogen supply to meet ever stricter environmental regulations and also increase hydrotreater yields.
Pinch analysis is a methodology for minimising energy consumption of chemical processes by calculating thermodynamically feasible energy targets and achieving them by optimising heat recovery systems, energy supply methods and process operating conditions. It is also known as process integration, heat integration, energy integration or pinch technology.
Water pinch analysis (WPA) originates from the concept of heat pinch analysis. WPA is a systematic technique for reducing water consumption and wastewater generation through integration of water-using activities or processes. WPA was first introduced by Wang and Smith. Since then, it has been widely used as a tool for water conservation in industrial process plants. Water Pinch Analysis has recently been applied for urban/domestic buildings. It was extended in 1998 by Nick Hallale at the University of Cape Town, who developed it as a special case of mass exchange networks for capital cost targeting.
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Petrolsoft Corporation (1989–2000) was a supply chain management software company with a focus on the petroleum industry. Petrolsoft Corporation was founded at Stanford University in 1989 by Bill Miller and David Gamboa as Petrolsoft Software Group. It was later incorporated in 1992. Petrolsoft introduced demand-driven inventory management to the petroleum industry.
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The service-oriented computing environment (SORCER) is a distributed computing platform implemented in Java. It allows writing network-programs that operate on wrapped applications (services) to spread across the network. SORCER is often utilized in scenarios similar to those where grids are used in order to run parallel tasks.
Aspen Plus, Aspen HYSYS, ChemCad and MATLAB, PRO are the commonly used process simulators for modeling, simulation and optimization of a distillation process in the chemical industries. Distillation is the technique of preferential separation of the more volatile components from the less volatile ones in a feed followed by condensation. The vapor produced is richer in the more volatile components. The distribution of the component in the two phase is governed by the vapour-liquid equilibrium relationship. In practice, distillation may be carried out by either two principal methods. The first method is based on the production of vapor boiling the liquid mixture to be separated and condensing the vapors without allowing any liquid to return to the still. There is no reflux. The second method is based on the return of part of the condensate to still under such conditions that this returning liquid is brought into intimate contact with the vapors on their way to condenser.
Power-to-X is a number of electricity conversion, energy storage, and reconversion pathways that use surplus electric power, typically during periods where fluctuating renewable energy generation exceeds load. Power-to-X conversion technologies allow for the decoupling of power from the electricity sector for use in other sectors, possibly using power that has been provided by additional investments in generation. The term is widely used in Germany and may have originated there.
Aspen HYSYS is a chemical process simulator currently developed by AspenTech used to mathematically model chemical processes, from unit operations to full chemical plants and refineries. HYSYS is able to perform many of the core calculations of chemical engineering, including those concerned with mass balance, energy balance, vapor-liquid equilibrium, heat transfer, mass transfer, chemical kinetics, fractionation, and pressure drop. HYSYS is used extensively in industry and academia for steady-state and dynamic simulation, process design, performance modelling, and optimization.
References
- Citations
- ↑ "Hydrogen optimization at minimal investment" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2009-11-05.
- ↑ "Pinch Analysis-" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-09-30. Retrieved 2009-11-05.
- ↑ REFOPT Archived 2008-12-25 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ Multi-period hydrogen management Archived 2011-07-22 at the Wayback Machine
- Sources
Nick Hallale, Ian Moore, Dennis Vauk, "Hydrogen optimization at minimal investment", Petroleum Technology Quarterly (PTQ), Spring (2003)