Design problem bottleneck

This chapter addresses project management aspects of a revamp. It also provides design guidelines that can be used by a refiner in selecting the revamp components. The original driving force for a project is often a particular mechanical problem or a process bottleneck. The ultimate objective of a revamp should be a safe, reliable, and profitable operation. 

The last talk in this session, by Andrew Lyddiatt (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom), showed how liquid-liquid extraction can address some of the problems associated with the purification of nanoparticulates (e.g., viral and nonviral gene delivery vehicles). Nanoparticles (particle size range 20-150 nm) with low diffusivity and low molalities in culture feedstocks pose unique process engineering problems in the design and implementation of selective recovery and formulation operations. This paper demonstrated how aqueous two-phase partition systems (polymer-polymer and polymer-salt) can circumvent the process bottlenecks posed by the use of... 

Over the last decade, chip designers have struggled with such limits and tradeoffs, best exemplified by the twin problems of memory bottleneck and power management. Although CPUs are a thousand times faster today than they were... 

Much of the laboratory time (perhaps 70-80%) will be taken up with routine samples taken from the processing line, and examination of these samples is designed to detect any problem. The preparation of samples for analysis takes a long time, therefore routine samples should be taken on days when analysis may be started and finished conveniently. Details of bottlenecks and problems are given. The remainder of the time will be spent examining any samples involved in the outbreak of a foodborne disease and dealing with consumer complaints. 

A.2. Burners and Zones. Many past furnaces were built with burners staggered from side to side, omitting burners above the strip in some zones, and with some zones oversized and others smaller than they should have been. The primary difficulty with these early designs was lack of flexibility. There was no problem as long as the furnace was to operate at very slow strip speed, but because the operators responsibilities were to achieve maximum throughput consistent with good quality, furnace problems often bottlenecked the process. 

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