Integrated membrane operations in the ethylene oxide production

Petrochemical industry, highly energy and capital intensive, might significantly benefit from the implementation of membrane operations for meeting stringent environmental standards, controlling production cost and final product's quality. Membrane units have been proved effective for improving the efficiency of different industrial productions. Ethylene oxide (EO), an important petrochemical intermediate, is produced by selective catalytic oxidation of ethylene, a valuable hydrocarbon feedstock. In this study, the EO manufacturing cycle is redesigned by integrating different membrane operations. Both the conversion and separation sections of the plant are investigated, considering the use of membrane reactors (MRs) for the separate feeding of the oxidant, membrane contactors (MCs) for the absorption of EO and carbon dioxide, and gas separation (GS) membrane units for the hydrocarbon recovery before their being recycled to the reactor. Design considerations are provided, and the benefits coming from each membrane operation, as well as from their synergic integration, are outlined with particular attention to environmental impact, raw materials and energy consumption.     

Risk-based maintenance planning of subsea pipelines through fatigue crack growth monitoring

Research and development in the field of risk-based maintenance of offshore structures has recently attracted large attention due to the significant level of accident risk and the cost associated with maintenance in such remote facilities. The uncertainties associated with the deterioration of these facilities require a sound decision making methodology for maintenance planning. This paper presents a dynamic risk-based methodology for maintenance scheduling of subsea pipelines subjected to fatigue cracks. The developed method can assist the asset managers to select the optimum approach for mitigating the consequences of failure while minimizing the maintenance costs. A Bayesian network is developed to model the probabilistic deterioration process and then it is extended to an influence diagram for estimating the expected utility of each decision alternative. Observation of damage state is included in the model to enhance decision making capacity. To demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, three cases with different fatigue crack incidents on a pipeline are considered. Based on the monitoring results, the model is able to determine whether the maintenance should be performed or not. The economic risk associated with maintenance is also minimized by suggesting the optimum maintenance technique among multiple possible methods such as welding or major repair.     

Risk-based process safety assessment and control measures design for offshore process facilities

Process operation is the most hazardous activity next to the transportation and drilling operation on an offshore oil and gas (OOG) platform. Past experiences of onshore and offshore oil and gas activities have revealed that a small mis-happening in the process operation might escalate to a catastrophe. This is of especial concern in the OOG platform due to the limited space and compact geometry of the process area, less ventilation, and difficult escape routes. On an OOG platform, each extra control measure, which is implemented, not only occupies space on the platform and increases congestion but also adds extra load to the platform. Eventualities in the OOG platform process operation can be avoided through incorporating the appropriate control measures at the early design stage. In this paper, the authors describe a methodology for risk-based process safety decision making for OOG activities. The methodology is applied to various offshore process units, that is, the compressor, separators, flash drum and driers of an OOG platform. Based on the risk potential, appropriate safety measures are designed for each unit. This paper also illustrates that implementation of the designed safety measures reduces the high Fatal accident rate (FAR) values to an acceptable level.     

Risk-based inspection and maintenance in process plants and their practices in Taiwan

The content of risk-based assessment and management and risk-based inspection and maintenance (RBI&M) employed in process plants are addressed in this article. Probabilistic analyses including probabilistic risk assessment developed in the engineering field over the past few decades are reviewed first. Following that, RBI and risk-informed management employed in the nuclear industry and risk-based inspection, maintenance, and other risk-based approaches used in chemical plants as well as their developments are reviewed, respectively. While most of the above were developed and practiced in industrialized countries, the current situation in Taiwan is also mentioned. Special attention is paid to the possibility and difficulties of employing RBI&M in Taiwan’s power and process plants. The difficulties in adopting existing risk-based approaches to inspect and manage Kaohsiung’s underground pipelines are pointed out in particular. Comments are made at the end of the article.     

Client-server model of integrated production facilities

The objective of the reported research is to develop a new design-model of distributed facilities, where production is integrated and operates under computer supported collaboration. The main innovation has been the exploitation of the analogy of the highly effective client-server computing environment for the benefit of production facilities design. As a variant of flexible manufacturing systems, the challenge is to manage the distributed material and information flow. The solution approach developed here is by protocols. The goal is to explain the design of the client-server production model and its coordination protocols, including functions of synchronization and resource allocation. An implementation of the model in an assembly and test facility and its application over the last three years serve to explain the model and illustrate its significance. Time-out and priority assignment protocols are defined and analysed in the context of the model to demonstrate its specific benefits.     

Systems analysis for planning of air fleets and maintenance facilities

The high cost and extraordinary demands made on sophisticated air defence systems, pose hard challenges to the managers and engineers who plan the operation and maintenance of such systems. This paper presents a study aimed at developing simulation and systems analysis techniques for the effective planning and efficient operation of small fleets of aircraft, typical of the air force of a developing country. We consider an important aspect of fleet management: the problem of resource allocation for achieving prescribed operational effectiveness of the fleet. At this stage, we consider a single flying-base, where the operationally ready aircraft are stationed, and a repair-depot, where the planes are overhauled. An important measure of operational effectiveness is ‘ availability ’, which may be defined as the expected fraction of the fleet fit for use at a given instant. The tour of aircraft in a flying-base, repair-depot system through a cycle of ‘ operationally ready ’ and ‘ scheduled overhaul ’ phases is represented first by a deterministic flow process and then by a cyclic queuing process. Initially the steady-state availability at the flying-base is computed under the assumptions of Poisson arrivals, exponential service times and an equivalent singleserver repair-depot. This analysis also brings out the effect of fleet size on availability. It defines a ‘ small ’ fleet essentially in terms of the important ‘ traffic ’ parameter of service rate/maximum arrival rate. A simulation model of the system has been developed using GPSS to study sensitivity to distributional assumptions, to validate the principal assumptions of the analytical model such as the single-server assumption and to obtain confidence intervals for the statistical parameters of interest.     

Combined pinch and exergy analysis of an ethylene oxide production process to boost energy efficiency toward environmental sustainability

Ethylene oxide production process is one of the highest energy consumers in chemical industry, and therefore even a slight improvement in its overall efficiency can have a significant impact on the sustainability of the process. Efficiency improvement can be carried out using the exergy-aided pinch analysis outlined in this paper. The overall exergy loss distribution in different unit operations of an ethylene oxide process was first evaluated and mapped out in the form of “visualized exergetic process flowsheet”. An initial analysis of the four main functional blocks of the process showed that the exothermic reaction block contained the largest exergy loss (6043 and 428 kJ/kg of internal and external losses, respectively) which can be reduced by isothermal mixing, as well as increasing reaction temperature and reduction in pressure drop. The absorption block was also estimated to have the second highest contribution with total exergy losses of 3640 kJ/kg which were mainly due to the cooling column. These losses were then recommended to be reduced by improvements in the concentration and temperature gradients along the tower. Following the block-wise analysis, exergy analysis was then carried out for individual unit operations in each block to pinpoint the main sources of thermal exergetic inefficiency. Thermal solutions to reduce losses were also proposed in accordance with the identified sources of inefficiency, leading to a comprehensive list of cold and hot process streams that could be introduced to reduce losses. Finally, pinch analysis was brought into action to estimate the minimum energy requirements, to select utilities, and to design heat exchanger network. Thus, the methodology used in this work took advantage of both exergy and pinch analyses. The combined thermal-exergy-based pinch approach helped to set energy targets so that all the thermal possible solutions supported by exergy analysis were considered, preventing exclusion of any hot or cold process stream with high potential for heat integration during pinch analysis. Results indicated that the minimum cold utility requirement could be reduced from 601.64 MW (obtained via conventional pinch analysis) to 577.82 MW through screening of streams by the combined methodology.     

Integrated maintenance and production control of a deteriorating production system

We consider a make-to-stock production/inventory system consisting of a single deteriorating machine which produces a single item. We formulate the integrated decisions of maintenance and production using a Markov Decision Process. The optimal dynamic policy is shown to have a rather complex structure which leads us to consider more implementable policies. We present a double-threshold policy and derive exact and approximate methods for evaluating the performance of this policy and computing its optimal parameters. A detailed numerical study demonstrates that the proposed policy and our approximate method for computing its parameters perform extremely well. Finally, we show that policies which do not address maintenance and production control decisions in an integrated manner can perform rather badly.     

A practical method for design of hybrid-type production facilities

A comprehensive method for the design of hybrid-type production shops, which comprise both manufacturing cells and individual workcentres, is presented. The method targets the minimization of the material handling effort within the shop and includes four basic steps: (1) identification of candidate manufacturing cells, (2) evaluation and selection of the cells to be implemented, (3) determination of the intra-cell layout, and (4) determination of the shop layout. For the cell formation step the 1CTMM technique has been enhanced to cater for important practical issues. The layout of each significant cell is determined by a simulated annealing (SA)-based algorithm. Once the sizes and shapes of the selected cells are known the shop layout is determined by a similar algorithm. The resulting hybrid shop consists of the selected cells and the remaining machines. The methodology has been implemented in an integrated software system and has been applied to redesign the shop of a large manufacturer of radar antennas.     

Amperometric sensing of ethylene oxide in the gas phase

The sensing device used is based on a porous Pt electrode, which is supported on an ion-exchange membrane and directly exposed to the gas phase. Under acid conditions, ethylene oxide was found to be oxidized on the platinum oxide surface at +550 mV vs MSE, thus enabling its monitoring via the measurement of the associated current. A detection limit of 15 ppb was obtained, based on a signal-to-noise ratio of three, and a linear dynamic range was found up to 100 ppm. The effects of mass transport, humidity, and oxygen on the cell response, as well as the cross sensitivity to other organic vapors and inorganic gases are discussed.     

Risk-based analysis of manufacturing systems

A manufacturing system considered here consists of a machine that processes parts and an automatic conveyor that transports immediately a finished part to an assembly cell (i.e. a single workstation facility is examined). The system can hold a maximum number of processed parts on the conveyor, which determines its size. Modelling the system as a family of Birth–Death Processes with finite size in equilibrium, indexed by the system utilisation parameter, and depending on the concepts of system information and system entropy (i.e. mean information), we promote a risk-based analysis of manufacturing systems. The current number of processed parts on the conveyor determines the system particular states. The performance measures of a system are: risk (i.e. uncertainty) of the system (represented by system entropy), throughput of the system, utilisation of the machine, utilisation of the conveyor, and information range of the system. They are simultaneously investigated with respect to the system utilisation parameter, in order for an optimal trade-off among them to be established. This analysis is illustrated on the information linear, Erlang, Binomial and Pascal held manufacturing systems. Regarding the managerial insights, a use case of a system target output is considered, comparing the above system types. This approach can also be used for analysis of an assembly line consisting of multiple machines that have different operation times and buffers between them.     

Surface modification of spherical magnesium oxide with ethylene glycol

The surface of spherical magnesium oxide has been modified with ethylene glycol in the presence of basic aqueous solution. Fourier transform infrared spectra have shown the presence of the graft group ethylene glycol on the surface of spherical magnesium oxide. In addition, this conclusion can also be drawn from appearance of new diffraction peak in X-ray diffraction pattern. Although magnesium oxide microspheres can directly react with ethylene glycol in 373 K for 24 h, owing to Lewis acid and alkali interaction, product derived is colloidal and difficult to filter so that their morphology is easy to be destroyed. However, in the presence of basic aqueous solution, their morphology still retains. The modified magnesium oxide illustrates a specific surface area of 55.9 m²/g and a narrow pore size distribution centered at 8.96 nm.     

提高环氧乙烷计量准确性的探讨与实践

由于环氧乙烷特殊的物理、化学特性,使其在充装、卸车、储存和运输上有特殊性。通过对充装工艺参数改进、测量过程操作控制及对客户装卸车工艺的指导,在提高环氧乙烷计量准确性方面的探索与实践,取得较为有效的成果。     

A maintenance driven scheduling cockpit for integrated production and maintenance operation schedule

The production and maintenance functions have objectives that are often in contrast and it is essential for management to ensure that their activities are carried out synergistically, to ensure the maximum efficiency of the production plant as well as the minimization of management costs. The current evolution of ICT technologies and maintenance strategies in the industrial field is making possible a greater integration between production and maintenance. This work addresses this challenge by combining the knowledge of the data collected from physical assets for predictive maintenance management with the possibility of dynamic simulate the future behaviour of the manufacturing system through a digital twin for optimal management of maintenance interventions. The paper, indeed, presents a supporting digital cockpit for production and maintenance integrated scheduling. The tool proposes an innovative approach to manage health data from machines being in any production system and provides support to compare the information about their remaining useful life (RUL) with the respective production schedule. The maintenance driven scheduling cockpit (MDSC) offers, indeed, a supporting decision tool for the maintenance strategy to be implemented that can help production and maintenance managers in the optimal scheduling of preventive maintenance interventions based on RUL estimation. The simulation is performed by varying the production schedule with the maintenance tasks involvement; opportune decisions are taken evaluating the total costs related to the simulated strategy and the impact on the production schedule.The full text can be downloaded at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40436-021-00380-z     

聚氧化乙烯气体分离膜的发展

聚氧化乙烯[poly(ethylene oxide),PEO]类膜材料含有大量与CO2有很强相互作用的醚氧基团,使得它具有很高的CO2/light gases(例如:H2、N2、CH4)溶解选择性,因此带来很高的CO2/light gases选择性.介绍了具有高溶解选择性CO2气体分离膜材料的筛选,重点叙述了PEO类膜材料的发展以及目前主要的PEO类膜材料的气体分离性能.当PEO含量达到足够高时,PEO类膜材料的CO2/light gases选择性大小基本相同,而它们的CO2透气性随着膜材料链段结构的不同而有较大不同.