Browsing by Author "Treitz, Martin"

Best Available Techniques (BAT) are an essential element in European environmental legislation as required by the Directive on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC 96/61 JEG). The technology transfer to industrialising countries, however, requires the adaptation of the underlying criteria, due to differences in economic, legal and technical conditions. Additionally, their prevailing technology standards and different priorities concerning the affected environmental media (air, soil, water) must also be considered. At hand of case studies for VOC emission reduction and prevention for coating applications in Chile, China and Germany, the use of a metric for country-specific determination of BAT is proposed. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The planning of production capacity has been extensively discussed in the literature. Seasonal demand of products or seasonal availability of input materials can make the problem even more challenging, due to a constant need for capacity adjustments. For example, the energetic or industrial use of biomass has several distinct characteristics in contrast to conventional chemical processes, such as a time dependent availability of raw materials. Therefore, suitable planning tools are required that take into account the dynamics of the production system (for example, by following the seasons and the yearly changes). Thus a recently proposed heuristic approach for aggregate production planning when facing a seasonal demand is analysed. This method is inspired by the graphical pinch analysis from chemical engineering; it is first illustrated with data from a bicycle company facing seasonal demand showing its plainness and some limitations. Then the transfer to situations with seasonal supplies of input materials is presented, as for biomass use in dynamic and seasonal markets. Using these applications, the simple heuristic, its limits and its benefits are put up for discussion.

With the advent of more advanced process models and computational power, process integration technologies have gained in importance in improving production networks to a more sustainable production. The pinch analysis approach from the chemical engineering field in connection with multi-criteria analysis provides a consistent assessment method for different mass and energy flows within a company, an industry park or even throughout a supply chain network. It consequently strives for a more comprehensive approach to optimize the system's performance as opposed to focusing on single operational units. The advantage of the pinch analysis can be seen in the determination of the theoretical optimum for a given set of heat and material streams. The approach is illustrated in this by a case study on a bicycle company in China, where target values were identified for heat integration, water management and solvents recovery. A subsequent multi-criteria analysis facilitates the selection of a preferred option by combining the different target values and investigating the overall optimization potential of different process design options.