(71a) An Integrated Approach to Separations Process Research

The importance of separations processes is demonstrated by their ubiquity in the chemical and petrochemical industries.  Many separations processes are also technologically mature, however, and it is often tempting for companies to forego rigorous separations research by limiting capital spending on benchtop- and pilot-scale programs.  For obvious economic reasons, experimental work has been replaced by the use of process simulators.  While this is understandable, it comes with a caveat: simulators are only as good as the data they use to make predictions.  To avoid the so-called “garbage in, garbage out” problem associated with simulation, an integrated approach to separation process research might be necessary. 

This talk will focus on how bench-scale and pilot-scale experimental facilities can be leveraged cost-effectively to do the key experiments required for enhancing process simulations, informing process economic evaluations, and enabling process scale-up.  Development of a solvent extraction process for hydrocarbon separation will serve as a case study.  Three efforts were undertaken in parallel: bench-scale solvent screening, pilot-plant validation and determination of scale-up parameters, and integration of experimental data into process simulations.  The results of this study indicated that neither simulation results nor experimental data alone were adequate to assess the overall performance of the extraction process.  However, by integrating key bench and pilot plant data into the simulation, a more accurate prediction of separation performance was achieved.