Quantitative overdesign of chemical processes

Overdesign is applied to chemical processes to account for expected variations in the design data or design conditions. These variables must be treated quantitatively in order to design a process that is certain to perform adequately. Process dependability is introduced as a means of quantifying variable process behavior. Overdesign using the dependability criterion is a stochastic optimization problem. An example problem with three stochastic variables and two design variables is presented to illustrate these procedures.