Process Integration under Size Constraints: Logistical Fuels for Mobile Applications

Current methods for resource management such as thermal and mass pinch analyses are aimed at processing facilities, i.e. stationary plants, where the overall goal is to balance reductions in operating cost against increased capital investments to maximize profitability. For a certain class of problems however, conventional pinch analyses fail to adequately address the resource management problems. For compact and/or mobile applications the deciding factor is not simply the resource utilization level or cost of equipment, but is often a trade-off between the achievable resource utilization and the weight and/or volume of the equipment. In this work, the integration potential of different reformation strategies has been evaluated for a variety of logistical fuel sources in size constrained systems.