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A new plant‐wide optimization method and its application to hydrometallurgy process
Author(s) -
Yuan Qingyun,
Wang Fuli,
He Dakuo,
Wang Hong,
Liu Tan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the canadian journal of chemical engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.404
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1939-019X
pISSN - 0008-4034
DOI - 10.1002/cjce.22395
Subject(s) - hydrometallurgy , mathematical optimization , coupling (piping) , process (computing) , optimization problem , computer science , scale (ratio) , series (stratigraphy) , process optimization , measure (data warehouse) , unit operation , mathematics , engineering , mechanical engineering , data mining , paleontology , physics , quantum mechanics , chemical engineering , environmental engineering , dissolution , biology , operating system
This work aims to find an efficient and fast solution for the problem of plant‐wide optimization of a large‐scale industrial process. The process is composed of a series of unit processes with coupling relationships between them, which leads to the problem of optimizing a large number of design variables and constraints. Therefore, the solution to the optimization problem is time‐consuming and the global optimum is obtained with a low probability. To efficiently solve the problem, a new plant‐wide optimization method is developed that decomposes the complicated optimization problem into several easier solvable sub‐problems based on the coupling relationships between unit processes. Two metrics, constraints coupling and indices coupling, are defined in order to measure the extent of a coupling relationship between pairs of unit processes. Then, the global optimum is found by successively solving the sub‐problems. Finally, the hydrometallurgy process of a gold smelter is demonstrated to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.