Xia Yang’s research while affiliated with Qingdao University of Science and Technology and other places

A new method based on water cascade analysis (WCA) is presented to synthesize water use in batch process in this paper. This method includes two key steps: determine the target and design the water network. The fresh water demands for overall process or certain time intervals with and without storage tank is identified. Also the determination of overall pinch point, the storage capacity and the storage tank numbers is discussed. A two dimensional water network diagram, the time-purity level diagram, is introduced to help target and design the water network. We use two cases to illustrate the method, the results show it can achieve the optimal batch process water network efficiently.

It’s very time-consuming to evaluate thermal properties by rigorous methods in process real-time simulation, especially when the simulated project relates to multi-units and multi-components, which takes about 70 to 80 percent of the total simulation time. We developed a new reduced method for thermal properties evaluation based on the artificial neural net(ANN), in which we established several reduced evaluation models using ANN, such as models of vapor-liquid equilibrium, models of vapor-liquid enthalpy and models of temperature calculated from given enthalpy. We used the reduced models in a dynamic distillation simulation. Compared with rigorous thermal properties models, the ANN-reduced models could save 10 to 20 times simulation time with a satisfied accuracy. The results show it’s an efficient and effective method.