MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION FOR DESIGN UNDER PRODUCTION PLANNING CRITERIA IN MULTIPRODUCT DEHYDRATION PLANTS

The design problem of a multiproduct dehydration plant involving continuous conveyor-belt dryers utilised for the dehydration of agricultural products over a finite time horizon, is presented. The peculiarities of the problem under demand-varying market patterns and time-variable market prices of raw materials are underlined. Limitations imposed by storage capacity, customer orders, and constraints dictated by the process itself, are also taken into consideration. The overall problem is cast into a MINLP formulation involving the total annual cost of die plant as its objective function. This was infered by deducing the mathematical model of conveyor-belt dryers. Repeated evaluation of the total annual cost for various structures and operating points, allowed the determination of overall performance characteristic operational and structural curves, approximated by suitable mathematical expressions. A test case is presented in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.