Existing plant designs are often conservative and as a consequence the opportunity to achieve full value is lost. Even for well-designed plants, the usage and profitability of mineral processing circuits can change over time, due to a variety of factors from geological variation through processing characteristics to changing market forces. Consequently, plant designs often require optimisation ...

The optimization of chemical processes where the flowsheet topology is not kept fixed is a challenging discrete-continuous optimization problem. Usually, this task has been performed through equation based models. This approach presents several problems, as tedious and complicated component properties estimation or the handling of huge problems (with thousands of equations and variables). We pr...

A flowsheet model for a continuous direct compression tableting process is developed and applied to process data. The model contains powder feeding, blending and tablet compaction unit operations. The dataset was provided by Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA using a GEA ConsiGma continuous direct compression process designed for a 50 kg/h throughput using a six ingredient, potentially comme...

A procedure is presented that synthesizes fractional crystallization separation processes to obtain pure solids from multi-component solutions. The method includes a procedure to generate a network flow model to identify alternative process designs for fractional crystallization. The main advantage of this systematic procedure with respect to other reported procedures is using non-equilibri...

For the separation of azeotropic mixtures with distillation usually a number of conceptual design alternatives are generated. Instead of evaluating the economic viability of the different alternatives by repetitive simulation studies, a combination of shortcut calculations and rigorous MINLP optimization is proposed. In this two step process the shortcut calculations are used to screen and rank...

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), along with other national laboratories, has been developing a solvent extraction process for partitioning of spent fuel constituents to lead to safer and cheaper disposal of high-level waste. The process, known as UREX+, separates key radionuclides from dissolved spent fuel into: (1) uranium for disposal as LLW, (2) technetium for disposal as HLW, (3) iodine f...