Profit Maximization Techniques for Operating Chemical Plants

Sandip K. Lahiri

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119532156
• eBook ISBN: 9781119532170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A systematic approach to profit optimization utilizing strategic solutions and methodologies for the chemical process industry

In the ongoing battle to reduce the cost of production and increase profit margin within the chemical process industry, leaders are searching for new ways to deploy profit optimization strategies. Profit Maximization Techniques For Operating Chemical Plants defines strategic planning and implementation techniques for managers, senior executives, and technical service consultants to help increase profit margins.

The book provides in-depth insight and practical tools to help readers find new and unique opportunities to implement profit optimization strategies. From identifying where the large profit improvement projects are to increasing plant capacity and pushing plant operations towards multiple constraints while maintaining continuous improvements—there is a plethora of information to help keep plant operations on budget.

The book also includes information on:

? Take away methods and techniques for identifying and exploiting potential areas to improve profit within the plant

? Focus on latest Artificial Intelligence based modeling, knowledge discovery and optimization strategies to maximize profit in running plant.

? Describes procedure to develop advance process monitoring and fault diagnosis in running plant

? Thoughts on engineering design, best practices and monitoring to sustain profit improvements

? Step-by-step guides to identifying, building, and deploying improvement applications

For leaders and technologists in the industry who want to maximize profit margins, this text provides basic concepts, guidelines, and step-by-step guides specifically for the chemical plant sector.

1
Concept of Profit Maximization

1.1 Introduction

There has been a drastic change of business environment in the last 20 years. Shrinking profit margins in chemical process industries (CPIs) due to globalization and an uneven level playing field in international chemical businesses have given rise to cut‐throat competition among process industries and has changed the global chemical business scenario (Lahiri, 2017b). Introduction of low cost technology in the market, cheap oil prices, a decline in the growth rate of Chinese and EU economies, the recent discovery of cheap US shale gas, for example, have added new dimensions in the business environment in recent years.

Modern process industries are experiencing the following new challenges in their businesses:

• Enforcement of stringent pollution control laws.
• Pressure from government agencies to change to more energy efficient processes and equipment.
• Constant encouragement from government to shift to safer and less pollutant processes and technology.
• Decline of sales prices of end products in the international market.
• More focus on sustainability and more reliable processes.

All these issues are forcing the process industries to look for new technological innovations so that new ways of doing business can be explored.

Profit maximization is at the core of every chemical company's vision and mission nowadays. Making money by safely producing chemicals and selling locally are no longer adequate to survive in today's business environment.

Maximization of profit, continuous improvement of operation, sustainability, and enhanced reliability to reduce production cost are buzzwords in today's CPI. Industries are slowly shifting their priorities to energy efficiency, real‐time process optimization, environment friendliness, and sustainability.

Running the plant at their highest feasible capacity by exploiting the margin available in process equipment is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Maximizing the profit margin by reducing waste products, by increasing mass transfer and energy efficiency of equipment, and by pushing the process to their physical limit are the current trends of CPI (Lahiri, 2017b).

Another challenge process industries are facing is the unprecedented fast rate of obsolescence. Chemical process technology and equipment are becoming obsolete at a very fast rate. New generation energy efficient processes, environment friendly low waste generated processes, and higher selectivity catalysts are coming to market every year and pose a survival threat to older plant and technology. Simple distillation columns that have dominated the process industries and refineries for the last few decades are no longer remaining competitive. Reactive distillation columns and low energy intensive membrane technology are slowly replacing the older technology. Apart from profit maximization, business objectives also venture out to the fields of sustainability, reliability, low environment impact, etc. With the advent of faster computers, online optimization, advance process control, real‐time plant monitoring, online equipment fault diagnosis, big data‐based process parameter data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and internet of things (IOT)‐based sensors and technology have found their way into process industries.

During this turbulent time, people and industries that cannot change their way of doing business quickly gradually become obsolete. Many industries and technologies that were running 25 years ago no longer exist as they could not cope with the changing requirements of modern times. After globalization, chemical industries needed to purchase their raw material and sell their finished products to the international market at the international market price. They have to compete with cheap raw material prices of OPEC countries, cheap manpower costs of China, big capacity of the Middle East plants, etc. Most of the traditional industries could not cope with this uneven competition and gradually became obsolete. Hence, to survive in today's business environment, industry needs to find new ways of doing business. Therefore, a completely new way of thinking and optimization is required to maximize profit. A complete paradigm shift in mindset is the need of the hour.

Profit maximization is one of the prime goals of every management team of process industries across the globe.

Profit maximization in running chemical plants is itself a huge challenge that needs to be addressed by holistic vision and procedures. What is the objective of profit maximization in the process industries? It is not simply waste or loss minimization and it is not simply energy and raw material minimization. It is much bigger than that. The ultimate goal of profit maximization is to use every resource available to the process industry in the most efficient manner so that dollar per hour generation is maximized and sustained over years. To achieve this goal, energy, raw materials, equipment, manpower, processes, and environment as well as the mindset of the people must be aligned and be holistically optimized.

Most of the time, engineers and managers working in process industries tackle this problem with a fragmented approach. Process engineers try to optimize process parameters, production engineers try to meet a production target rate, energy managers want to minimize energy consumption, maintenance engineers try to increase equipment uptime, reliability engineers try to increase equipment and process an on‐stream factor, safety engineers try to reduce accidents and incidents, etc. All of them try to increase profit in their own way without paying attention to what other people are doing. Sometimes, their objectives are contradictory. However, a profit maximization project needs to holistically combine all their effort in the most efficient way so that sustainability and profit maximization are achieved.

The main constraints of a technical work force in various process industries today is that they are too loaded with various types of managerial and technical jobs that they do not have time to see things holistically. Furthermore, the mind sets of plant managers and engineers are not aligned with the larger vision of profit maximization and sustainability. They are not equipped with techniques and methods that can combine all the fragmented approaches and do an overall optimization. No such procedures have been available until now. Therefore, the current challenge of a profit maximization project is: how can we develop a road map so that all of the available intelligent tools and techniques can be utilized effectively to support plant engineers as well as top management?

Over the years, engineers working in process industries have believed that reducing loss and waste is the only way to achieve efficiency. Thus, to them, energy efficiency means to identify and rectify steam leaks, faulty steam traps, damage insulation in steam lines, less flaring, cleaning of fouled exchangers, etc. In the last decade they focused on these basic old housekeeping parts of energy efficiency. These are the techniques of past decades. With the advent of faster computers and data historians, every minute many process parameter data are stored, with the availability of offline process simulators (like Aspen, Pro II, etc.) and online advanced process control (APC) and real‐time optimization (RTO) applications. With the advance of artificial intelligence‐based data analytics a complete new generation of profit maximization tools and techniques are currently available. This book attempts to highlight some of these proven new generation tools, which slowly being introduced in progressive process industries. Adaptions of these new techniques in process industries need a mindset change of engineers and management. The real challenge becomes: how can a mindset change of management be made so that new generation techniques can be quickly applied to generate profit. How can these new generation tools and techniques be learnt and adapted quickly? The challenge boils down to: which methods should be selected, how can they be tailor‐made to fit them into specific applications, and how can they be implemented for specific circumstances?

1.2 Who is This Book Written for?

However, there are no dedicated effective books available to discuss a basic roadmap to utilize various intelligent tools and techniques, provide practical methods to implement them on the shop floor, and explain industrial application procedures.

This book has been written to fill this gap with the following people in mind: practicing process or chemical engineers, production engineers, supervisors, and senior technicians working in chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceuticals, paper and pulp, oil and gas companies and petroleum refineries across the globe. This book will also become particularly useful for large numbers of managers, general managers, top level senior executives, and senior technical service consultants whose main jobs include strategic planning and implementation of various optimization projects to increase profit in chemical process industries. Undergraduate and postgraduate chemical engineering students and business students who want to pursue careers in the chemical field will also greatly benefit from this book. The book is aimed at providing various intelligent computational tools to engineers and managers working in CPI who face challenges and are looking for new ways to increase profit in running chemical plants. This book aims to convey concepts, theories, and methods in a straightforward and practical manner.

This book provides engineers with all practical aspects of profit maximization projects, as well as practical advice on how to derive maximum benefits from running plants.

The book will present various intelligent computation techniques covering profit optimization strategy, application methodology, supporting structures, and assessment methods. In short, it will describe completely new ways and techniques to maximize profit for process plants and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Figure List
• Table List
• Preface
• 1 Concept of Profit Maximization
• 2 Big Picture of the Modern Chemical Industry
• 3 Profit Maximization Project (PMP) Implementation Steps
• 4 Strategy for Profit Maximization
• 5 Key Performance Indicators and Targets
• 6 Assessment of Current Plant Status
• 7 Process Modeling by the Artificial Neural Network
• 8 Optimization of Industrial Processes and Process Equipment
• 9 Process Monitoring
• 10 Fault Diagnosis
• 11 Optimization of an Existing Distillation Column
• 12 New Design Methodology
• 13 Genetic Programing for Modeling of Industrial Reactors
• 14 Maximum Capacity Test Run and Debottlenecking Study
• 15 Loss Assessment
• 16 Advance Process Control
• 17 150 Ways and Best Practices to Improve Profit in Running Chemical Plant
• Index
• End User License Agreement