The integration of innovative equipment technologies in production processes offers efficiency potentials with regards to energy and resource demand as well as investment and operating costs. For the estimation of these potentials, a sufficiently detailed database is necessary as well as the possibility to consider particular boundary conditions of the production process, infrastructure of the production site, and the overall plant design. A structured concept for the selection of suitable equipment technol-ogies and sizing rules for the design of the equipment for a desired process task are presented in this review. The combination with an appropriate modeling approach allows a holistic assessment of technically feasible solutions to quantify economic and ecological efficiency potentials of the equipment technologies. The application of this concept is demonstrated on the task of a typical heat transfer problem in the special chemicals sector.
For the assessment of separation technologies from an ecological and economic perspective, a case study was performed to investigate the influence of entrainment on energy and resource demand of a single apparatus and on a single production process. Taking the example of the Rectisol process, the influence of droplet entrainment on individual separation equipment as well as on the process as a whole was identified via flowsheet simulation. Based on the calculated mass and energy balances, an LCA and LCC approach was used for the quantification of the entrainment influence.
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