Optimal Process Design of Hydrogen Production Using Response Surface Methodology

Conceptual process design is a key step to the commercialization of novel technologies, where a network of reaction-separation-recycle processes is synthesized to produce target products from given raw materials. Such design is often realized using commercial process simulators (e.g., Aspen Plus, gPROMS) to calculate mass and energy balances, which can then be used as a basis for the evaluation through, for example, techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment. In such evaluation, the reference design is very important as it forms the foundation for further analysis such as sensitivity analysis. However, it is typically determined heuristically, leading to a design with suboptimal (or even poor) evaluation metrics. To address this problem, in this work, model-free design of experiment methods are implemented to optimize process designs developed using Aspen Plus. Performances of different methods are compared using representative chemical process examples. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.