Material transfer - Methodology

The process industries - chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, etc. - have given rise to an applied science known as process engineering. Process engineering is divided into two parts: on the one hand, the study of the processes - chemical, biochemical, etc. - specific to each process, and on the other, chemical engineering, which deals with the equipment where these processes are implemented, independently of the particular process.

The purpose of chemical engineering is to determine the layout, sizing, operating conditions and control of process industry equipment, in order to achieve the required performance. These performances can be achieved in a large number of configurations. The choice between these configurations is driven by the search for an optimum, within the framework of constraints. Some constraints are regulatory or social: zero pollution, zero accidents; others are commercial: zero defects, minimum time between order and delivery. The optimum is economic: costs must be minimized. Uncertainties are inevitable. They must be taken into account: the industrial objective is often defined as "just right": the result must be guaranteed without excessive safety factors.

When designing a production unit, it's important to strike the right balance between equipment size and operating conditions (i.e., to a first approximation, energy consumption), to ensure that the required performance is achieved. This duality can be transposed to the economic sphere, and the two parts correspond respectively, by oversimplifying, to investment and operating costs. Economic optimization rarely concerns a single operation: the search for the optimum will more often than not be carried out for an entire process. It therefore involves a complex set of operations and their interconnections. Adapting the operating conditions of a production unit to conditions different from those which governed its design, whether for raw materials or finished products, is subject to the same constraints and to the search for the economic optimum. An important novelty for the adaptation of production units is that it now takes place within a dynamic framework, by integrating, for example, the transition from one production to another into optimization: this is an important part of the activity known as production management.

The sizing of production units has a cost; it is part of the investment and represents a significant proportion of it. Just as we avoid building production units with oversized resources, so we must avoid excessive precision in chemical engineering calculations, as it is unnecessarily costly.

The presentation of material transfer and the equipment that implements it therefore has the following industrial objective:...