Process Debottlenecking and Intensification

Continuous process improvement is a critical element in maintaining competitiveness of the process industries. An important category of process improvement is process debottlenecking. To overcome the limitation of conventional sequential unit-by- unit debottlenecking approach, this book introduces a new approach. This new approach is simultaneous in nature and is based on posing the debottlenecking task as a process integration task which links all the design and operating degrees of freedom and exploits synergies among the units and streams to attain maximum debottlenecking. A Intensification, to debottleneck a process and to improve process safety is also addressed in this book. A new definition and classification of intensification is introduced. This classification distinguishes between two types of intensification: single unit and whole process. Process integration and optimization techniques are used to develop a systematic procedure for process intensification. Focus is given to the interaction among the process units while enhancing the intensification of the process.

Dr. Musaed Muhammad Al-Thubaiti received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering and certification in business from Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. Dr. Al-Thubaiti can be contacted at: musaed.thubaiti@aramco.com, thubaiti@gmail.com or P.O. Box 9521, Dhahran 31311, Saudi Arabia.