Process synthesis for biorefineries

Biomass has been proven a viable feedstock in several bioindustries and theoretically has potential for new bioproducts. There is plenty of scope in research and development to synthesise feasible integrated processes for a wider range of products. There should be strategies for manipulating characteristics of biomass, which consider economic, social and environmental aspects, along with technological feasibilities. The aim of the study reported in this thesis was to demonstrate the functioning of the suggested evolutionary optimisation method in conceiving heuristics for biorefineries. The method involved carrying out optimisations to the superstructures, which were generated by following the predicted heuristics. The procedure followed the PAR method, which is equivalent to Siirola's general design paradigm (1996a). The base case selected was the corn dry milling ethanol process which produces DDGS asis the by-product. The models developed to evaluate the heuristics emphasised on mass balance and economic analysis. The mass balance was generated by followining a particular matrix operation, which was one of the contributions of this study. Remainder and Generation terms were suggested, for which Key-factor, Remainder and Generation matrices were required. Incorporating new units to the base case model would be easier once these two terms have been identified.