With the increasing emphasis on agile operations, the process industries have begun to focus on effectively managing transient operations such as transitions or batch/fed-batch processes. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based decision fusion framework for monitoring and diagnosing faults during transitions. The proposed method integrates three fault diagnosis methodologies into a unifor...

Existing refinery distillation systems are highly energy-intensive, and have complex column configurations that interact strongly with the associated heat exchanger network. An optimisation approach is developed for existing refinery distillation processes. The optimisation framework includes shortcut models developed for the simulation of the existing distillation column, and a retrofit shortc...

There is a clear link between safety and reliability in system design and operation. So the knowledge about sources of failure, their physical consequence related to plant operation and the frequency of effects (incident consequence) is of great value for improvement. Next, the selection of best improvement alternative should be justified by complete life cycle cost benefits. In this contributi...

This paper introduces the krypton sampling and extraction facilities currently developed at the Centre for Science and Peace Research to collect and extract the krypton content from small air samples. The extraction unit able to isolate the krypton in small ambient air samples with high speed and high efficiency using a combination of cryogenic distillation and gas chromatography. Air samples a...

Charles McFall, Adiwinata Gani, Prashant Mhaskar, Panagiotis D. Christofides, and James F. Davis Chemical plants are large-scale systems that involve a complex, distributed arrangement of a number of processing units (reactors, distillation columns, absorbers, pumps, heat exchangers, etc.) connected in series or in parallel, with recycle of material and energy integration among various parts of...

In industry, many separation processes involve the separation of multicomponent mixtures using distillation. There are many distillation configurations that can carry out the same overall separation process. These configurations use an equal number of distillation columns, but they differ significantly in energy consumption. Therefore a major challenge for a practitioner is the identification o...

This work presents a reactive distillation column for the catalytic disproportionation of trichlorosilane to silane which includes three consecutive reversible reactions. This reaction system is however characterized by a large distinction in the boiling points of the components, which make the reactive distillation extremely favored. Nevertheless, the normal reactive distillation column posses...

The structure of thermally coupled distillation systems offers several control challenges arising from the transfer of vapor (or liquid) streams between columns. In particular, the presence of recycle streams for coupled schemes has led to the notion that control problems might be expected during the operation of these systems, in contrast to the rather well-known behavior of conventional disti...