Task 1: Identify (through a search of publicly available information) details about your chemical product. Collect useful information about your product – for example, why is the product important? What are its uses? What are its characteristic properties? Who are the biggest producers?
Task 2: Collect as much information you can find for the process you have chosen (based on the reaction steps) to make your product. You need to decide about the additional details of the raw material (that should be used) and the product quality – check also the process design document for additional (specified) details about the product and the raw material.
Task 3: Use an appropriate method for process synthesis to generate feasible processing routes and select one for further investigation. The use of a process group contribution method and a superstructure based optimization method will be highlighted in this task. ProCAFD will help you to perform process group based flowsheet (processing route) generation. Also, a superstructure based optimization to find the optimal processing route will be employed through Super-O software.
Task 4: Perform a mass balance on the process flowsheet you have selected. Note that before you can complete a mass balance, you will need to make a number of design decisions and you will need a model for performing mass balance calculations. ProCAFD will help you to model and perform simple mass and energy balance calculations.
Task 5: Add temperatures and pressures on every stream-operation to perform a mass and energy balance with the simple model. ProCAFD will help you to perform these calculations.
Task 6: Using the results from task 5 as the basis, perform mass and energy balances using the simple process model from task 4. Also, energy (heat) added or removed from each unit operation will be calculated. ProCAFD will help to perform these calculations.
Task 7: The simple models are now replaced with more rigorous models so that the mass and energy balances can be performed with more detailed design. ProCAFD will help to determine the process designs and launch the PROII simulator for rigorous process simulation.
Task 8: Using the results from Task 7, equipment sizing and costing calculations are now performed for all equipment in the process flowsheet. A number of new design decisions need to be taken here. The sizing and costing values will indicate if the earlier decisions need to be changed, and previous steps (tasks) need to be repeated. The ECON software tool can be used for these calculations.
Task 9: Using the results from Task 8, perform an economic evaluation of the design process. Here you will need to use data you collected before on costs, as well as new data that will need to be obtained. The results will indicate if the decisions taken previously are still reasonable. If yes, then you have an acceptable “base case” design. ECON is used for this task.
Task 10: Using the results of Task 9, investigate if opportunities for heat and mass integration exist. If yes, apply them. This will reduce the operating (manufacturing) cost and therefore, the process economics will improve. PROII and tools from ProCAFD is used in this task.
Task 11: Using the updated process (design) flowsheet from Task 10 as the basis, perform environmental impact and sustainability calculations to verify if your design decisions are also acceptable from an environmental point of view. See supplied notes for environmental impact analysis. SustainPro (for sustainability analysis) and LCSoft (for life cycle assessment) are employed here.
Task 12: Investigate if the base case design (plus changes due to mass/heat integration) at the end of Task11 can be further improved. Formulate a process optimization problem to improve the profit further, without making the environmental impact worse than the design at the end of Task 11.
