Lionel O'Young

Short-term site-wide maintenance scheduling

Abstract Preventive maintenance is essential for every chemical production site to prevent failure and accidents, however, it upsets material and utility flows inside the site and also causes production loss. In order to minimize the loss, maintenance of each plant unit has to be carefully scheduled together with considerations on site-wide material and utility balances. This will involve both production and utility systems, and indeed is a very complicated problem. A scheduling strategy is then employed to handle the problem efficiently. It divides the scheduling into two steps, long-term and short-term. Long-term maintenance scheduling determines the combination of plant shutdown in a period of 2–5 years. Base upon the long-term schedule, a short-term maintenance scheduling optimizes the exact timing of plant shutdown, overhaul, inspection and startup within a maintenance period of 4–10 weeks. Short-term maintenance scheduling involves pre-set utility and material demand profiles during a plant shutdown, overhaul and startup making it a very challenging task. In this paper, a multi-period mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, a site-model, is proposed as an aid to optimize short-term site-wide maintenance schedule. A special formulation is also developed to deal with the pre-set utility and material demand profiles in the site-model.

Multi-site utility integration—an industrial case study

Abstract Mitsubishi Kasei and Mitsubishi Petrochemical merged to become Mitsubishi Chemical in 1994 making it the largest chemical company in Japan. This allows two original companies’ production sites, especially for those are physically built next to each other, to improve themselves by multi-site integration. Mitsubishi Yokkaichi production plant site is one of the typical examples, which consists of three individual plant sites in the old company structure. Each plant site contains a utility plant to generate steam and electricity for chemical production. After the company merge, connecting steam and electricity among plant sites have been carried out for better flexibility, efficiency as well as capability of the utility systems. Besides these, there are still many other improvement alternatives. A site-model, which includes all three utility plants and production units, was then developed to explore further opportunities. In this paper, applications at Mitsubishi Yokkaichi production site are presented to illustrate the features of the site-model.

Vision of 21st century's plant and how to get there

Abstract To design, operate and manage the optimum chemical process, we needed to master many important technical components; such as computer aided technology, conceptual design, design of control, equipment design, business optimization, etc. Each component consists of huge amount of knowledge. Expertise for each components are needed to master the necessary skill and to successfully implement them. Among all the disciplines in chemical engineering and other related subjects, it is very difficult to identify the key components. Moreover, it is even more difficult to bring all the specialists together and integrate all of their technologies. To achieve this integration, “technology fusion” serious planning and management are required. In Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, we have carefully laid out the necessary components for achieving the optimum chemical process. Furthermore, we have laid out the foundation and the necessary procedure for us to reach our goal, “the 21st Centurys Plant.”

Workflow management in chemical process development

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the concept of workflow management in chemical process development, in which the numerous tasks that need to be performed in process development are identified and broken down into generic activities. The activities are organized in a workflow architecture that supports iterative, modular, and concurrent development. Appropriate tools are selected and templates for expressing and documenting information are proposed, to enhance communication among stakeholders and expedite future development projects. An example focusing on reaction and crystallization steps are also presented in the chapter to illustrate this framework. This chapter proposes a framework for devising and managing workflows for chemical process development, which is applicable for pharmaceutical and fine chemical processes as well as for commodity chemicals. Clearly, the most suitable workflow for executing a project depends on many factors, including the nature of the project itself, as well as the company situation.

Integrated approach to crystallization process design for fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals

Abstract Designing a crystallization process that can recover the right product with a reasonably high yield and sufficiently high purity is often a key task in ensuring overall process feasibility in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industry. An integrated approach for crystallization process design which combines synthesis with modeling and experimental activities is presented. By first modeling the thermodynamic behavior of the system, feasible operating regions and the need for further experimental verification can be identified. Kinetics and mass transfer effects are considered next. Modeling of phase behavior and relevant downstream operations helps to design experiments and organize the results in a meaningful way, and more importantly, points to the right direction as to what should be done next, thereby minimizing the required time, effort, and cost for developing the process.

Simultaneous site-wide energy, waste and production optimization - industrial case studies

Abstract In a petrochemical plant site, production, waste treatment and utility systems are three essential elements. They interact with each other via the flows of utility, waste and material, hence creating a lot of options and economic trade-offs among them. To obtain the optimal solutions for the trade-offs, site-wide bottlenecks must be located accurately. Then the three systems could be debottlenecked and optimized simultaneously. This paper proposes the Site-Model, a mathematical model, to debottleneck and optimize the petrochemical plant site site-widely. The model adopts a technique called the marginal value analysis (MVA) for achieving the task.

A novel software tool for crystallization process development

Abstract A new software application has been developed to assist both chemists and chemical engineers in the early stage of crystallization process development. The software enables the users to quickly identify feasible process alternatives through generation of solid-liquid equilibrium phase diagrams. It provides a convenient platform to integrate modeling, experimental, and synthesis activities involved in the crystallization process development workflow. Packaged as a collection of tools, it can accommodate various needs in a flexible manner instead of following a rigid workflow. An example illustrates the use of the software in a typical crystallization process development project.

Development of software tools for crystallization system synthesis

Publisher Summary A systematic framework has been developed as part of an effort to expedite the development of crystallization systems. The framework consists of three components: flowsheet synthesis, experimental efforts, and modeling activities. While in a typical scenario these three activities are performed sequentially, iteration among steps is often necessary to come up with a superior design. In each step, economic evaluation is implemented to identify the most feasible alternatives. These design activities are closely interconnected with modeling and experimental efforts. To facilitate the efforts, various software tools have been developed. These include generation of phase diagrams based on thermodynamic calculations, representation of experimental data on phase diagrams, and simulation of particle size distribution of the crystallizer product. The software tools are modular in nature so that engineers in process development can use any of the tools that they like in isolation and add their own in-house tools as appropriate.