Application of Optimization to the Study of Chemical Processes

Four Chemical Processes are Optimized

The five programs provided solve several process design problems. These examples were originally provided as applications of process design optimization by Edgar, Himmelblau and Lasdon in their excellent book entitled Optimization of Chemical Processes, McGraw-Hill International Edition, 2001. This is a widely used undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering textbook and it is an excellent opportunity to show how MATLAB makes the optimization of complex process design problems straightforward. The author obtains the same results using MATLAB, Mathematica and GAMS as those provided by Edgar et al. in their book. GAMS and Mathematica files are available upon request from author.

1/ Power_binous.m optimizes a boiler/turbo generator system, a linear programming problem.

2/ Filter_binous.m finds the economic operation of a fixed bed filter, a nonlinear programming problem.

3/ cracker1_binous.m and cracker2_binous.m obtain the optimal operations of a thermal cracker for two cases. These examples are two linear programming problems.

4/ Alkylation_binous.m provides the best operating parameters for a simplified alkylation unit. It is a nonlinear programming problem.

Please visit this link for similar treatment using Mathematica:

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/5909/

For GAMS files, please visit contributions by Binous at:

http://www.gamsworld.org/performance/plib/credits.htm

http://www.gamsworld.org/global/globallib/credits.htm