Process Synthesis, Design and Analysis using Process-Group Contribution Method

Process synthesis implies the investigation of chemical reactions needed to produce the desired product, selection of the separation tec hniques needed for downstream processing, as well as making decisions on sequencing the involved reaction and separation operations. This work highlights the development of computer aided methodology for fast , reliable and consistent generation of process flowsheets and rank them based on various flowsheet performance indices. This Computer Aided Flowsheet Design methodology is a hybrid approach[1] that combines the physical insights of the knowledge based methods [2] with mathematical programming techniques [3] to formulate and solve a superstructure based optimization problem.