Process Engineering is Changing You Can Sense It

摘要

The role and responsibilities of the Process Engineer are rapidly evolving. This is in part because economic drivers to automate control of batch and continuous operations for consistent molecular compositions also apply to maintaining consistent-process performance to meet more demanding product specifications. Both of these criteria are showing a greater return on investment (ROI) initiated by traditional process control strategies, but enhanced with specific (on-line) composition analysis. Incorporation of state-of-the-art point-of-use physical property measurements (temperature/pressure/flow) combined with chemical specific (molecular species) sensors provides unique feedback enabling the process engineer to better apply "model predictive control (MPC) " techniques. Such sensor technologies may allow the engineer to know the process composition at each fray in a distillation tower, or at purification tower positions in temperature or pressure swing absorbers (TSP or PSA) in "real-time" to alert for break-thru. Chinese Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu circa 600 BCE said, "To Know and not to do is not to know". It is our role as chemists and engineers to know and to do to gain true process control. Knowing the capabilities and limitations of the new sensor technology and how such sensors are evolving, can provide unique insights for the process engineer, who in turn will challenge the process analytical chemist to improve sensor specificity and performance.