4.8.

FLOWSHEET OPTIMIZATION 221

Figure 4.49. Specifications for the rigorous distillation column.

are used sparingly; otherwise, too many recycles of information can be introduced and
convergence becomes difficult.
Controllers behave much like recycles, and it is usually a good idea to generate a
converged simulation to act as a good initial estimate before adding controllers. This
does not apply to simple controller functions such as feed ratio controllers.
In a dynamic simulation, controllers are used to model the real control valves of the
process. When converting a steady-state simulation to a dynamic simulation, some
care is needed to ensure that the controller functions correspond to physically
achievable control structures.

4.8.2. Optimization Using Process Simulation Software

The commercial process simulation programs all have the ability to solve optimization
problems that can be posed as nonlinear programming (NLP) problems. At the time of
writing, they do not allow the designer to carry out discrete optimization using integer
variables. It is, therefore, not possible to optimize integer parameters such as number
of trays or feed tray, while simultaneously optimizing continuous variables. It is also
not possible to carry out superstructure optimization using the commercial simulation
programs.
Optimization of a large process simulation model is intrinsically difficult, particu-
larly if there are multiple recycles. As noted in Section 1.9.9, the solution algorithms