Sustainable approaches for abnormal situation management for an ethylene process plant

Abstract

The focus of my research is to develop the concept of sustainable design, which involves process-design activities that lead to economic growth, environmental protection, and social progress for the current generation without compromising the potential of future generations to have an ecosystem that meets their needs. The ultimate target of my research activities is to conserve natural resources (mass and energy), recycle and reuse materials, prevent pollution, enhance yield, improve quality, advance inherent safety, and increase profitability. To achieve the desire goals a systematic framework and associated concepts and tools are necessary to guide designer methodically with the global insight of the process, to identify root causes of the problems or key areas of opportunities, to benchmark the performance of the process, and to develop a set of design recommendations that can attain the true potential of the process. My research background of process integration, process control and specially process optimization assist me for developing new concepts and tools to systematically enhance and reconcile various process objectives, such as cost effectiveness, yield enhancement, energy efficiency, and pollution prevention. I am working last few years to develop such methodical sustainable approaches for various processes starting from small scale production (producing valuable pharmaceutical drags using liquid chromatography) to large scale facility (managing industrial flares during abnormal situations). As my specialization is to work with different kinds of optimization algorithms and control concepts, I would also like to face the challenges from process uncertainty and from the black box problems which can be mitigated using sustainable process integration. My knowledge of research is not limited to the industrial processes, I have also implemented my acquire optimization knowledge to develop some adaptable financial modelling/algorithms which can be used in the most challenging and unpredictable global financial markets. The strong point of my research activity is that I can use my long experience of capital market to develop long term view for energy and commodity prices; this knowledge can be integrated with my developed framework to make the system/design more robust to face different kind of challenges including unpredictable price fluctuations (price fluctuations of oil, natural gas etc.), unpredictable incidents (industrial flaring) or unknown disturbances (sudden changes in process parameters)