Environmental impact reduction through simultaneous design and scheduling

A systematic framework and the associated mathematical formulation for process design and scheduling while simultaneously addressing economic and environmental objectives is developed. A procedure is developed to enable the development of a process retrofitting scheme while incorporating scheduling issues for typical process and market variations. The environmental issues pertaining to the parametrized process retrofitting, scheduling, and operation strategies integrated with the environmental impact of these changes are discussed. The resulting framework identifies opportunities for synergism between the economic and environmental objectives. The procedure is illustrated with a case study on an oil refinery. Various results for the case study and for the broader aspects of a typical processing facility are discussed. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting (Salt Lake City, UT 11/4-9/2007).