UCLA

Over the course of the last forty years, process intensification (PI) has continued to develop as an area of active chemical engineering research, incorporating numerous considerations, including process safety and process systems engineering. PI encompasses any process design strategy that leads to a smaller, cleaner, safer and or more energy-efficient technology. Additionally, PI also includes system designs which reduce the number of devices employed. To this end, chemical reactor design incorporating separation technologies continues to be an active area of PI research, with prominent examples membrane reactors (MR) carrying out steam methane reforming (SMR) based hydrogen production at lower temperatures, dividing-wall columns combining multiple distillation channels into a single unit, and compact catalytic plate reactors for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. As advances in computational software continue, there has also been a substantial increase in the number of tools developed for identifying new PI methodologies at the theoretical level. Advanced mathematical formulation, such as the Infinite DimEnsionAl State-Space (IDEAS) framework and multi-objective optimization techniques, have helped introduce systematic approaches for developing and identifying PI pathways for various chemical systems. These advances have naturally led to the development of software for the generation of sustainable design alternatives to be used for PI purposes, as well as for using thermodynamic analysis to assess the viability of proposed technologies. The objective of this work is to present novel process intensification methodologies for the creation of a potential intensified reaction networks. In chapter 1, the PI concept is reviewed. Then, the first PI methodology developed in this work, the Storage Reactor (SR) concept, is formulated and demonstrated in chapter 2. The SR process is shown to enhance methane conversion and hydrogen yield over traditional steady state processes by combining multiple operations within a single unit, a key component of process intensification methods. Then, the novel Lexicographic method for network synthesis is first formulated in chapter 3 and its ability to synthesize reaction networks is demonstrated in chapter 4. Discussion and Conclusions are presented in Chapter 5, the Appendix containing mathematical formulations is presented in Chapter 6, and references are provided in Chapter 7.