Chemical batch processes have become significant in chemical manufacturing. In these processes, large numbers of chemical products are produced to satisfy human demands in daily life. Recently, economy globalization has resulted, in growing worldwide competitions in tradi.tional chemical .process industry. In order to keep competitive in the global marketplace, each company must optimize its production management and set up a reactive system for market fluctuation. Scheduling is the core of production management in chemical processes. The goal of this paper is to review the recent developments in this challenging area. Classifications of batch scheduling problems and optimization methods are introduced. A comparison of six typical models is shown in a general benchmark example from the literature. Finally, challenges and applications in future research are discussed.
A novel process to recovery natural gas liquids from oil field associated gas with liquefied natural gas (LNG)cryogenic energy utilization is proposed.Compared to the current electric refrigeration process,the proposed process uses the cryogenic energy of LNG and saves 62.6%of electricity.The proposed process recovers ethane, liquid petroleum gas(propane and butane)and heavier hydrocarbons,with total recovery rate of natural gas liquids up to 96.8%.In this paper,exergy analysis and the energy utilization diagram method(EUD)are used to assess the new process and identify the key operation units with large exergy loss.The results show that exergy efficiency of the new process is 44.3%.Compared to the electric refrigeration process,exergy efficiency of the new process is improved by 16%.The proposed process has been applied and implemented in a conceptual design scheme of the cryogenic energy utilization for a 300 million tons/yr LNG receiving terminal in a northern Chinese harbor.
It is shown in this article that by changing the initial operation condition of the batch processes, the dynamic performance of the system can be varied largely, especially for the initial operational temperature of the exothermic reaction. The initial operation condition is often ignored in the designing batch processes for flexibility against disturbances or parameter variations. When the initial condition is not rigid as in the case of a batch reactor, where the initial reaction temperature is quite arbitrary, optimization can also be applied to determine the ＂best＂ initial condition to use. Problems for dynamic flexibility analysis of exothermic reaction including initial temperature and process operation can be formulated as dynamic optimization problems. Formulations are derived when the initial conditions are considered or not. When the initial conditions are considered, the initial condition can be transferred into control variables in the first optimal step. The solution of the dynamic optimization is on the basis of Rugge-Kutta integration algorithm and decomposition search algorithm. This method, as illustrated and tested with two highly nonlinear process problems, enables the determination of the optimal level. The dynamic performance is improved by the proposed method in the two exothermic reaction examples.
Today’s changeable market and resultant disturbance of crude oil supply require agile and flexible scheduling of crude oil operation. The objective of flexible scheduling is to keep stable crude oil op-eration and satisfy production demands under the circumstances of supply disturbance. In this paper, a new mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) formulation is set up for crude oil scheduling firstly, and then some heuristic rules worked out by some experts are proposed to linearize bilinear terms and prefix some binary variables in the MINLP model. These rules not only reduce the complexity of the MINLP model, but also can be used to solve the scheduling problems in various conditions. In case study, the new model with heuristic rules and the best models reported in the literature are com-pared and evaluated in three benchmark examples in the normal situation, and then three abnormal situations of supply delay are considered based on the new approach. The results of case study show that the new flexible approach can handle crude oil scheduling problems efficiently in both normal and abnormal conditions.
