A general procedure for the synthesis of process flowsheets

This report is a summary of research progress in areas. The first is evaluating control systems for chemical plants at the conceptual design stage, including the effects of trace components, the desirable design modifications to improve dynamic control, developing short-cut dynamic models for complete plants, and control structures for distillation systems. Continuing work on a generalized approach to the synthesis of process flowsheets is also summarized. We discuss a general structure for the structure of processes involving vapor/liquid/liquid/solid separations along with a related short-cut method to describe liquid/liquid phase splits. The generalization of design methods to batch processing is also discussed. 5 refs.