Design and engineering of sustainable process systems and supply chains by the P‐graph framework

Abstract

The design of sustainable manufacturing processes and supply chains is rapidly becoming a critical issue. The reason is the necessity of providing for the needs of a growing human population which is increasingly prosperous across the globe. To this purpose, this review article explores the most important elements of sustainability science and couples them with the P‐graph framework, thereby rendering it possible to design feasible process and supply structures with great ease. Structure is an often‐overlooked aspect of process and supply chain design, in part because even relative simple processes or supply chains can have an enormous number of feasible structures. We further illustrate the application of these ideas with examples of energy generation processes and supply chains. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 37: 624–636, 2018

The P‐graph approach for systematic synthesis of wastewater treatment networks

“…In this work, we use the Process graph (P‐graph) framework to study the systematic synthesis of WWT networks using the stagewise approach. This framework has been extensively deployed to evaluate problems of combinatorial nature, such as supply chains, evacuation route design, and process network synthesis 15‐17 . The advantage is that not only is the best structure in terms of cost obtained, but a ranked list of near‐optimal solutions is also created.…”

“…To demonstrate the selection of these feasible networks from the overall possible networks predicted by Equation ), we use the P‐graph‐based 13‐16 stagewise WWT synthesis approach. We present our approach via a representative case study of a wastewater stream containing contaminants such as settleable solids, metals, and chemicals where the minimum purity requirements for water reuse or safe disposal have been specified.…”

The FluxMax approach: Simultaneous flux optimization and heat integration by discretization of thermodynamic state space illustrated on methanol synthesis process

“…The decoupling of nonlinear preprocessing and subsequent flux optimization is achieved by representing the chemical process network as directed graph (digraph) that consists of nodes and edges. Also Friedler et al (1992) used a graph representation and introduced material and operating nodes (Cabezas et al, 2018). In contrast, the FluxMax approach distinguishes between four types of nodes (or vertices In order to move from one TSN M i to another TSN M i+1 , elementary process functions (EPF) are required.…”

Evaluation of the Energy Supply Options of a Manufacturing Plant by the Application of the P-Graph Framework

“…A thorough collection of P-Graph applications can be found in [26], showing that the framework is useful in various case studies, including transportation, supply chain system design and plant management. There is a particular review that focuses on P-Graph applications on sustainability projects, like optimization from processing facilities to supply chains [27]. Another review is made by [28], which also notices possible future developments of the framework.…”