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Module-based plant design opens up the opportunity for the (bio-)chemical industry to reduce lead times, which is crucial for future competitiveness. Equipment modules are designed once such that they can cover a wide range of process tasks and conditions. The time-consuming equipment design step is replaced by selecting the most suitable equipment module from an equipment module database so that engineering work is reused. It is the aim of this work to develop a structured approach for the determination of features to characterize industrial process tasks. On the one hand, these characteristic features determined are required for the generation of an equipment module database based on cluster analysis of industrial process tasks (Eilermann et al., 2017). On the other hand, the characteristic features are a measure for similarity of process tasks and support the selection of the same equipment module for similar tasks. Thereby, reuse of engineering is enabled. The approach for the determination of characteristic features presented is based on those used in data mining, whereas the quality of the characteristic features is traded off against the computational effort required. The approach developed is exemplarily applied to industrial liquid/liquid heat exchanger and condenser tasks kindly provided by Evonik.

Module-based plant design opens up the opportunity for the (bio-)chemical industry to reduce lead times, which is crucial for future competitiveness. Equipment modules are designed once such that they can cover a wide range of process applications and conditions. The time-consuming equipment design step is replaced by selecting the most suitable equipment module from an equipment module database so that engineering work is reused. Although of central importance in module-based plant design, an applicable equipment module database has not been developed, yet. Therefore, it is the aim of this work to develop a methodology for the generation of shell and tube heat exchanger modules for an equipment module database. Existing industrial heat transfer applications are grouped by a hierarchical clustering algorithm. For each cluster of applications a representative heat exchanger is selected. A set of possible representatives is generated in a Sobol sequence from which a heat exchanger is selected to be the representative that covers most of the applications inside the cluster considered. The representative heat exchangers are stored in the equipment module database. The resulting 17 heat exchanger modules can cover 59% of the considered industrial applications despite their considerable diversity regarding conservative operating constraints.

A modular production plant consists of predefined apparatuses with a fixed design, called equipment modules. Selecting the equipment module with the appropriate suitable capacity to compensate fluctuations in production rate is one of the key challenges in module-based plant design. The equipment module’s operating window needs to fit and determines the point in time when a capacity expansion is required so that the operating window of the equipment module also affects a capacity expansion strategy. In order to avoid an unnecessary use of multiple apparatuses in parallel, equipment modules should be developed specifically for a large operating window in contrast to conventionally designed equipment. Therefore, an approach is required to design equipment modules for flexibility in production rate. In this work a method to design equipment modules for flexibility based on a global sensitivity analysis and the deduction of design rules of thumb is introduced. This method is applied to the design of a liquid/liquid heat exchanger without phase change. The resulting design for flexibility is compared to the conventional design with regard to the operating window and investment as well as operating costs. It is shown that for 14% higher annual costs a four-fold operating window can be obtained. This presents an important step towards increasing the competitiveness of modular production plants.

Modular plant design is an approach for making chemical production more flexible and more efficient. Different approaches for modular plant design have been developed, for example in the CoPIRIDE or F³ factory project. They have in common that reductions in design and construction expenses for modular equipment and its assembly are expected e.g. by preassembly of modules in a workshop under controlled conditions resulting in less field work on the construction site for erection. However, the main disadvantage of the modular approach is the loss of economy of scale. Thus, the effective impact of the modular concept concerning the fixed capital investment has to be investigated. In this article, a new approach for estimating fixed capital investment of modular production plants will be presented and applied using a generic example. Based on the results we expect that positive effects through modularization on engineering and construction costs can nearly compensate the loss of economy of scale. In the investigated example investment costs of the modular plant are 12% higher than for the comparable conventionally built plant. Such increase could allow other effects that are attributed to the modular concept to be employed to advantage. That would be an economic improvement and a reduction of investment risk in view of the modular plant’s life cycle.

A more flexible and efficient production of chemicals is a requirement for further strengthening the competitiveness in the chemical industry. An approach proposed to achieve this is modular plant design. It offers new opportunities for the supply chain and combines production flexibility and efficiency. However, modular facilities are expected to be built at comparably small scales and loss of economy of scale is a major concern. There is a need to know under which conditions a modular plant design is a beneficial option. Addressing this it would be helpful to have a methodology that includes modeling of production scenarios in a holistic way including supply chain and process simulation and thus allowing a meaningful evaluation. For that reason we developed such a methodology, using the F3 factory concept as an example for modular plant design. Demonstrating the methodology's feasibility an exemplary implementation in a software tool was established enabling comparative simulation and evaluation of batch, continuous and the modular F3 factory production. As unique feature supply chain and process simulation is combined in a single software implementation allowing for statistical analysis to automatically evaluate the economic performance of production concepts under different boundary conditions of the process and the supply chain. The incorporation of those boundary conditions is usually not part of process simulation and goes beyond state of the art approaches. In this paper, the methodology implemented will be presented and the application will be demonstrated using two production scenarios as examples. For the examples investigated, it was found that compared to the conventional production concept the modular F3 factory concept is economically robust concerning the choice of design capacity with regard to diverse market conditions.