LAUSR

Abstract Traditionally, the heat integrated schemes begin from the well-designed process, design parameters of a chemical process are first optimized based on various objectives (economic, environmental, sustainable, etc.), followed by the stiff heat integration. This may result in the omission of competitive solutions and unfair process comparisons. However, the reverse procedure, potential heat integrated structures prior to parameter optimization, require an exhaustive enumeration and is time-consuming. As a solution, this work proposes a simultaneous process parameter and heat integration optimization approach, by incorporating the consideration of heat integrated networks into a stochastic optimization procedure. Four complex industrial organosilicon production configurations with 4 or 5 columns, as illustrative examples, verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.