Optimal Design and Flexible Operation of a Fully Electrified Biodiesel Production Process

Abstract

The flexible operation of electrified chemical processes, powered by renewable electricity, offers economic and potentially ecological incentives, contributing to more sustainable chemical production. However, this requires a departure from the traditional steady-state operation, posing a challenge to process design and operation. We propose flexible biodiesel production by utilizing intermediate and final buffer tanks. We investigate the flexibility of three process configurations and compare the outcomes of their dynamic optimization strategies with those of a steady-state operation, considering a typical demand-side response scenario. For all strategies, we employ local gradient-based optimization and solve them using our open-source optimization framework DyOS. Our findings indicate that by incorporating intermediate tanks, we fully exploit the process flexibility potential, leading to energy savings of up to 29%. We also propose an implementation based on distributed optimization problems, yielding similar savings while significantly reducing computational costs by over 10-fold, thus paving the way toward online application.