OPTIMISATION OF CRYSTALLISATION BASED SEPARATION SCHEMES

摘要

Crystallisation-based separation has a wide variety of industrial applications. Because of the significant role the separation processes play in the operating cost of a chemical plant, the optimal design of separation scheme is of great importance. The crystallisation based separation schemes are described using a network flow model. The construction of the network flow is based on the identification of feasible thermodynamic states. The overall network is formulated as an optimisation problem whose objective is to minimise the operation cost that constrains the mass balance, flow-rate specification, and composition specification. In the present work a system with three solutes was investigated. The optimisation problem is solved using non-linear programming implemented in GAMS.