Dominic C. Y. Foo: Process integration for resource conservation

Excerpt

In this new book, Dominic Foo outlines a decade’s worth of developments in pinch analysis research, with specific emphasis on applications to industrial resource conservation problems. This volume is part of the ‘Green Chemistry and Chemical Engineering’ series by CRC Press, and deals primarily with the question of how engineers should design industrial networks to be more inherently efficient (and thus, by implication, more sustainable). It provides a comprehensive, rigorous treatment of various methodologies for designing industrial resource conservation networks (RCNs); it also provides a broad range of case studies of special cases of such RCNs, including (predominantly) water reuse networks, refinery hydrogen networks, utility gas networks, etc. Furthermore, in this study, Foo begins with the simplest general case of direct matching between stream sources and demands within a single plant operating in continuous mode. He then progresses towards various advanced topics, including batch operations; networks with regeneration, treatment and pretreatment; property-based measures of stream quality and process integration across multiple plants. In many cases, the material covered is based on the state-of-the-art from process integration, much of which is drawn from the author’s own work. Each chapter ends with a guide for further reading plus a list of references for any reader curious to learn further details about the subject matter. …