Chemical Process Engineering & Simulation

Advantages of Process Intensification: Although [1] named the reduction of the cost of a production system as the primary incentive for process intensification (PI) there are other advantages. They are: Improved quality More efficient use of raw material Reduced energy consumption Improved product quality Greater reliability Reduced waste Easier scale-up Distributed plant These advantages will now be discussed separately. Improved Safety: Significantly smaller plants have smaller contained volumes. If all other risks remain equal, a reduced plant inventory must increase the safety of a plant. The major safety, health and environment related incidents such as Flixborough , Bhopal and Seveso all occurred when a large volume of material escaped. It has been mentioned in [6] that “What is not there cannot leak, explode or otherwise endanger life or the environment”. It is possible that the contained energy of smaller plants will be small enough that an expl...

Process Intensification: Process Intensification (PI) has been defined as “a philosophy of plant design and construction whereby a given performance is achieved in very much smaller equipment - typically with a volume reduction of two or three orders of magnitude” [2]. These reductions in size can come from using smaller individual pieces of equipment or by cutting the number of unit operations or pieces of equipment used in the process. A volume reduction of a factor of two or more (not necessarily two orders of magnitude) was considered by [3] to be drastic enough to be labelled PI and this work broadened the definition of PI to include a dramatic increase in production capacity within a given volume, a significant decrease in energy consumption per ton of product, or large decreases in waste or by-product formation. The concept of Process Intensification (PI) was developed within ICI in the late 1970’s when Colin Ramshaw began to look into various ways of reducing the size...