Estudio de simulación del diseño del flujo del proceso "Downstream" en la producción de ácido succínico utilizando el software SuperPro Designer.

Abstract

Succinic acid has various uses in multiple industries such as food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Succinic acid was traditionally produced petro-chemically. Due to various factors such as alarming environmental impacts and expensive catalysts costs, the biological method of succinic acid production from fermentation broth has been applied widely. However, the downstream recovery process is known to be a costly one. SuperPro Designer® is a software that can be applied to conduct economic analysis of this downstream recovery process. For that reason, the purpose of this research to utilize SuperPro Designer® software in creating a complete flowsheet of the downstream recovery process using initial data and operating conditions from previous experimental works. Using the flowsheet that had been created, the final composition of succinic acid was obtained. Then, economical evaluation was carried out for the downstream process. Results obtained demonstrated that 3545.07 kg/batch of 98% pure succinic acid crystals were obtained as the final product. Economic evaluation showed noteworthy results as the process is deemed viable and economically feasible according to the Economy Evaluation Report (EER). The payback time was 2.88 years and the unit production cost was estimated to be 23.40 MYR/kg. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out and results showed that the process is still viable at ±25% cost of fermentation process while it showed a negative Net Present Value (NPV) at a 25% decrement in the selling price of succinic acid. Results found in this research demonstrated the potential of using SuperPro Designer® as a simulation tool in estimating costs and predicting the process feasibility.<br /