Economic and environmental impacts of the energy source for the utility production system in the HDA process

The well-known benchmark process for hydrodealkylation of toluene (HDA) to produce benzene is revisited in a multi-objective approach for identifying environmentally friendly and cost-effective operation solutions. The paper begins with the presentation of the numerical tools used in this work, i.e., a multi-objective genetic algorithm and a Multiple Choice Decision Making procedure. Then, two studies related to the energy source involved in the utility production system (UPS), either fuel oil or natural gas, of the HDA process are carried out. In each case, a multi-objective optimization problem based on the minimization of the total annual cost of the process and of five environmental burdens, that are Global Warming Potential, Acidification Potential, Photochemical Ozone Creation Potential, Human Toxicity Potential and Eutrophication Potential, is solved and the best solution is identified by use of Multiple Choice Decision Making procedures. An assessment of the respective contribution of the HDA process and the UPS towards environmental impacts on the one hand, and of the environmental impacts generated by the main equipment items of the HDA process on the other hand is then performed to compare both solutions. This ‘‘gate-to-gate’’ environmental study is then enlarged by implementing a ‘‘cradle-togate’’ Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), for accounting of emission inventory and extraction. The use of a natural gas turbine, less economically efficient, turns out to be a more attractive alternative to meet the societal expectations concerning environment preservation and sustainable development

Integration of process design and control: A review

There is a large variety of methods in literature for process design and control, which can be classified into two main categories. The methods in the first category have a sequential approach in which, the control system is designed, only after the details of process design are decided. However, when process design is fixed, there is little room left for improving the control performance. Recognizing the interactions between process design and control, the methods in the second category integrate some control aspects into process design. With the aim of providing an exploration map and identifying the potential areas of further contributions, this paper presents a thematic review of the methods for integration of process design and control. The evolution paths of these methods are described and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are explained. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research activities

HARD: Hard Augmentations for Robust Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a simple and successful method to transfer knowledge from a teacher to a student model solely based on functional activity. However, current KD has a few shortcomings: it has recently been shown that this method is unsuitable to transfer simple inductive biases like shift equivariance, struggles to transfer out of domain generalization, and optimization time is magnitudes longer compared to default non-KD model training. To improve these aspects of KD, we propose Hard Augmentations for Robust Distillation (HARD), a generally applicable data augmentation framework, that generates synthetic data points for which the teacher and the student disagree. We show in a simple toy example that our augmentation framework solves the problem of transferring simple equivariances with KD. We then apply our framework in real-world tasks for a variety of augmentation models, ranging from simple spatial transformations to unconstrained image manipulations with a pretrained variational autoencoder. We find that our learned augmentations significantly improve KD performance on in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation. Moreover, our method outperforms even state-of-the-art data augmentations and since the augmented training inputs can be visualized, they offer a qualitative insight into the properties that are transferred from the teacher to the student. Thus HARD represents a generally applicable, dynamically optimized data augmentation technique tailored to improve the generalization and convergence speed of models trained with KD

Control of Plant Wide Processes Using Fractional Order Controller

Fractional order PID controller is gaining popularity because the presence of two extra degrees of freedom, which have the potential to meet up the extra degrees in terms of uncertainty, robustness, output controllability .In other words, the fractional order PID controller is the generalization of the conventional PID controller. In the current study, the fractional order PID controller is designed and implemented for the complex and plant-wide processes. Distillation is the most effective separation process in the chemical and petroleum industries but with a drawback of energy intensivity To reduce the energy consumption two distillation columns can be combined into one column, which is known as dividing wall distillation column (DWC).Though the control of DWC has been addressed but it requires further R&D efforts considering the complexity in control of this process In this work the DWC is controlled by the advanced control strategy like fractional order PID controller. One of the challenging field in the process control is to design control system for the entire chemical plant. We have presented the control system for the HDA plant by implementing the fractional order PID controller. Both the discussed processes are multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system and these processes are difficult to tune because of the presence of the interaction between the control loops. For the DWC process, the traditional simplified decoupler is used, while for the HDA plant process the equivalent transfer function model is used to handle the MIMO system. For tuning of the fractional-order PID controllers the optimization techniques have been used. The DWC controllers have been tuned by the ev-MOGA multi objective algorithm and the HDA plant controllers are tuned by the cuckoo search method