Understanding Optimization in Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering

Of course, you do not have the knowledge required to solve these interesting problems, but you already have the capability to at least approach them. With the help of spreadsheets you will be able to attempt and solve problems that are stimulating and that will give you a broad awareness of chemical and bioprocess engineering. In addition, with confidence we can state that the most important part of dealing with engineering problems is to have the capability to correctly formulate them, and this capability was developed and heavily stressed in previous chapters. 

if not all, engineering problems are subject to optimization. We cannot mentiOTi all the possibilities of optimization that you will encounter in chemical and bioprocess engineering, but in the sections on solved and proposed problems (Sects. 11.7 and 11.8), you will be exposed to a wide variety of optimization situations. In this section, we present several real optimization situations in different applications in chemical engineering, food processing, biochemical and bioprocess engineering, and environmental engineering. 

Industrial fermentation plants consist of three main sections preparation, fermentation, and product recovery. The preparation section usually contains operations such us medium preparation and sterilization and inoculum propagation. The fermentation section is the heart of the plant where the transformation of raw material into products takes place. The product recovery section encompasses the downstream operations needed to obtain the product of interest with the required purity (Reisman 1988). In the design of fed-batch and batch fermentation plants, one faces the problem of figuring out the adequate combination of the number and size of fermenters to be used to meet the desired production schedule. In principle, the problem has an infinite number of solutions because for any given fermenter size, a number of units of that size will do the work. Nevertheless, not all solutions are equal from an economic standpoint (Simpson et al. 2005). 

Optimum number of retorts in canned-food plants 

Nowadays chemical, food, and bioprocessing companies are major consumers of water, and the water sources that are available have great relevance. Many studies indicate that water resources are often used inefficiently. In addition, at this time the demand for potable water, environmental regulations, increasing costs of supply and wastewater treatments, and other factors require that industries find efficient solutimis, i.e., optimizing the use and management of water for processing. 

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