OPTIMAL PRODUCTION STRATEGY AND DESIGN OF MULTIPRODUCT BATCH PLANTS

Methods of sizing batch equipment for multiproduct batch plants usually assume production of a single product at a time. In some cases, however, lower unit sizes are achieved instead by running multiproduct campaigns. This paper proposes a nonlinear mathematical program to search for both the best production strategy and the minimum equipment sizes simultaneously. Since the number of multiproduct campaigns becomes extremely high for large problems, a preliminary step eliminating nonefficient campaigns is performed. Besides that, one usually can still find the problem optimal solution. On the basis of the equal-batch-size assumption, simple analytical expressions are derived to find an initial feasible solution. Several examples have been successfully solved in a short number of iterations. Analysis of the results shows that the use of multiproduct campaigns often brings about a significant savings in capital cost. © 1990, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.