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Overview of Group's Research
The Process Integrationand Systems Optimization research
Group, led by Dr. Mahmoud El-Halwagi, focuses on
process synthesis, design, operation, integration,
and optimization, molecular and product design,
as well as industrial pollution prevention. The
key theme is the development of systematic methodologies
that enable chemical engineers to identify optimum,
sustainable, and creative strategies that lead
to productivity enhancement, yield improvement,
debottlenecking, pollution prevention, and energy
conservation. Fundamental chemical engineering
principles are coupled with systems engineering
approaches to develop graphical, algebraic, and
computer-aided optimization tools that are generallyapplicable
and can address a wide variety of existing and
new processing facilities such as the petroleum,
petrochemical, fiber, pharmaceutical, food, mineral
processing, and micro-electronics industries. In
particular, the following research topics are currently
investigated by our group:
Mass Integration
Our group is internationally recognized for pioneering
work in developing mass integration science and methodology.
Mass integration is a holistic approach to the generation,
separation, and routing of species and streams throughout
the process. It is a systematic methodology that
provides a fundamental understanding of the global
flow of mass within the process and employs it in
identifying performance targets and optimizing the
allocation and generation of streams and species
with the objectives of enhancing yield, conserving
resources, debottlenecking, mitigating environmental
impact, and conserving energy.
Property Integration
Recently,
we have introduced the novel area of property
integration. We define
the new paradigm
of property integration as a functionality-based,
holistic approach to the allocation and manipulation
of streams and processing units which is based
on tracking, adjustment, assignment, and matching
of functionalities throughout the process. The
new concept of clustering has been introduced
to enable the conserved tracking of surrogate
properties.
Hence, the process design can be optimized based
on integrating properties instead of chemical
species. This design is referred to as “component-independent
design”. The objective of our research in
this area is to develop systematic techniques
for this new paradigm and to illustrate its applicability
to industrial processes.
Energy Integration
Most processing facilities employ significant
quantities of utilities including fuel, power,
heating, and cooling. Our energy integration research
has the objective of optimizing and reconciling
the usage of the various forms of energy by capturing
the global insights of energy flow and allocation,
establishing rigorous bounds on utility consumption,
and providing optimum strategies to attain the
targets. Systematic design and operation tools
are developed to optimize heat-exchange profiles,
steam generation and consumption, heating-cooling
utility integration, combined heat and power, cogeneration,
and novel heat-exchange devices.
Pollution Prevention and Environmental Biocomplexity
As
a result of the staggering environmental problems
associated with manufacturing
facilities, the process
industry has gradually shifted from downstream “end-of-pipe” pollution
control to the more effective practice of in-plant
pollution prevention. Nonetheless, in order to
undertake any modifications in the core processing
units, it is inevitable to fully understand and
appreciate the integrated nature of the process.
Our research employs process integration to overcome
these challenges through the application of systematic
and generally applicable approaches which transcends
the specific circumstances of the process and
view the environmental problem from a holistic
perspective.
The result is the development of cost-effective
and sustainable pollution-prevention strategies
at the heart of the process.
In a broader sense, we also investigate the impact
of industrial products and processes on biocomplexity
in the environment. Our research in this area focuses on two major topics:
- Ecological modeling of water sheds and development of integrated strategies for sustinable development.
- Global analysis and mitigation of green house gases
- Assessment and optimization of the use of agricultural sources (e.g., switchgrass) in producing biofuels/bioenergy and in biorefineries.
Advanced Life Support Systems
Our research in this NASA-sponsored research is to develop a comprehensive
framework for system analysis and integration
for the emerging area of advanced life support (ALS) for planetary habitation. This work develops qualitative and quantitative understanding of how the various multiscale modules
and subsystems perform and interact as a function of various variables. First, the ALS system is described in terms of interacting systems integration problems. These integration problems
are mapped to mass and energy integration subproblems. The basic pathway to for crop production, food production, and waste management are identified. Basic integration models are developed
to track mass and energy and to generate optimal scheduling policies. An optimization-based approach is developed to systematically integrate ALS tasks and develop
the next generation of ALS technologies.
Integrating Process and Molecular Design
A key challenge in the process industries is the
selection of alternative raw materials, reaction
pathways, material utilities, and products Our
research focuses on integrating the design of molecules
and reaction pathways with the design of the process.
Systematic techniques are employed to synthesize
functional groups into molecules that are optimally
integrated with the process. In particular, we
have introduced the new concept of property integration
which provides a powerful framework for integrating
process and molecular design and can substantially
reduce the cost of experimental work by nominating
a focused set of candidate species and reaction
pathways that demonstrate optimal performance from
the perspectives of the process and the species.
Global Optimization
Many process synthesis and design activities can
be formulated as mixed integer nonlinear programs.
As a result of the nonconvexity of most of these
programs, there is a significant need for developing
rigorous tools for attaining global optima. Decomposition
and bounding techniques are employed to identify
rigorous bounds on the solution and excluding local
optima. Computer-aided tools are used to automate
the search till the global solution is identified.
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