TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Two provided holistic techniques for identifying overall targets for benchmarking mass consumption and discharge. These targets are determined ahead of detailed design. Once a target is determined, it is necessary to develop cost-effective strategies to reach the target. For a given target, there are numerous design decisions that must be judiciously made. These include addressing the following challenging questions:
What are the optimum stream-rerouting strategies?
Should any streams be segregated, mixed, or rerouted? Which ones?
Which streams should be recycled/reused? To which units?
Should design variable and/or operating conditions of existing units be altered? Which ones? To what extent?
Is there a need to add/replace units? Which ones? Where to add/replace?
Should interception (e.g., separation) devices be added? Which streams should be intercepted? To remove what? To what extent?
Which separating agents should be selected for interception?
What is the optimal flowrate of each separating agent?
How should these separating agents be matched with the rich streams (i.e., stream pairings)?
Because of the prohibitively large number of alternatives involved in answering these questions, a systematic procedure is needed to extract the optimum solution(s) without enumerating them. This is the role provided by mass integration. Mass integration is a holistic and systematic methodology that provides a fundamental understanding of the global flow of mass within the process and employs this understanding in identifying performance targets and optimizing the allocation, separation, and generation of streams and species. Mass integration is based...
