Interval Analysis – An Application to Solvent Design

This presentation discusses the use of an interval analysis based global optimization approach for the systematic design of cleaning solvent blends (commonly referred to as blanket washes) for lithographic printing. The simultaneous consideration of associated process constraints, property requirements, and environmental restrictions makes the blanket wash design a rather difficult problem. To address this, we present a framework for designing cleaning solvent blends that meet thermo-physical property requirements and environmental restrictions. The resulting mathematical program is a mixed-integer optimization problem involving (a) the selection of solvents from a set of pure component solvents (the discrete problem) and (b) finding the blend composition (the continuous problem). The framework has been used to solve an industrially relevant problem of designing optimal blends for blanket wash applications in the printing industry taking into account solvent power, viscosity and surface tension.