Design and Optimisation of Chemical Plants

The lectures will provide the students (from an Industrial Chemistry or Chemistry background) the basic concepts for the design of industrial scale chemical processes. The course will provide the fundamentals for sizing and rating of the main equipment found in a chemical process, in order to evaluate efficiency, yield, cost and to provide suggestions for integration and de-bottlenecking. The concepts for sizing and rating will be provided during the course, so no entry level knowledge of chemical plants is required. This makes the course suitable also for those chemists who want to have an idea about the concepts underlying the industrial process design.

At the end of the course the students should be able 1) to understand the main criteria for sizing and rating of the single reactors and unit operations, as well as of complex integrated plants; 2) to follow heuristic and standard guidelines for a preliminary design of a chemical process; 3) To follow basic methods for the optimization and heat integration of chemical processes; 4) To make a preliminary cost assessment of the solution proposed; 5) To be confident with state of the art software for process simulation.