New Appoaches in the Process Industries: The Manufacturing Plant of the Future

By Jean-Pierre Dal Pont and Catherine Azzaro-Pantel

Competition from emerging and developing countries, challenges related to energy and water, the continuing increase in the global population and the obligation to be sustainable are all impacting developed countries such as the United States, France, etc. Manufacturing has been almost totally neglected by these developed countries and thus there is a strong need to review R&D and the development and industrialization processes. This is a prerequisite for maintaining and improving welfare and quality of life.   The industrialization process can be defined as the process of converting research or laboratory experiments into a physical tool capable of producing a product of value for customers of specified markets. Such a process implies knowledge of BAT (best available techniques) in chemical engineering, plant design, production competitiveness, the proper utilization of tools (toolbox concept) such as value assessment, value engineering, eco-design, LCA (lifecycle analysis), process simulation, modeling, innovation and appropriate metrics usage.  These are mandatory to ensure commercial success and covered by the authors of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jul 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118984512

Book preview

Introduction

New Approaches to the Process Industries: The Manufacturing Plant of the Future

We are living in an uncertain world that is undergoing periods of transition. Undoubtedly, among them, ecological and energy transitions are vital issues for our society, which must involve less natural resource-intensive consumption models. In 1972, the book The Limits to Growth [MEA 72]¹, commissioned by the Club of Rome, warned of the limitations of the world’s resources and paved the way for the concept of sustainability. This concern is increasingly relevant due to the world’s population growth, the pressure this puts on the environment and the desire of people for a better standard of living and well-being. In this pursuit, there is a strong need for new eco-designed products, new alternative technologies for product recycling and reuse, as well as for new techniques for water and energy management.

The process industries that encompass the chemical, pharmaceutical, oil, cosmetic, metallurgical industries and all those transforming raw materials by chemical, biological and physical routes are at the core of numerous value chains for providing customers with products and services that satisfy their needs.

Smart, safer, cleaner eco-efficient, more autonomous using renewable energies, more flexible and more integrated plants are some of the catchwords that are often used to depict the future of manufacturing plants.

To achieve this goal, production facilities cannot be separated from the firms and enterprises that will take the financial risk of building and operating them.

Nowadays, this risk has risen dramatically due to globalization involving fierce competition between states, in particular between industrialized and emerging countries.

In this context, new engineering and design approaches as well as new manufacturing methods are an essential prerequisite for profitable businesses using a lifecycle plant approach.

The authors believe that manufacturing may be the new paradigm for the process industries and this focus is perhaps one of the most important aspects of this book which aims to address academic, theoretical as well as management matters involved in process unit operations. In this endeavor, world class manufacturing (WCM) methods are developed, including those for continuous improvement.

In the authors’ minds, designing the plant of the future hinges on good understanding of traditional process development and engineering methods. This book is intended for students, chemists, chemical engineers, production workers and all professionals of the process industries such as supply chain managers, research and development (R&D) and development engineers. Its objective is to provide new systemic insights into the evolution of the problems themselves and into the methods and tools that will be required by the professional who has to integrate new skills, capabilities and perspectives.

This book is organized into nine main chapters:

– Chapter 1: Project Management – Systems Engineering – the Industrialization Process

This chapter deals with project management and highlights the necessary systems-thinking approach in order to convert R&D results into an industrial perspective. It provides a lifecycle-thinking approach discussed throughout other chapters, and stresses the importance of projects in the life and management of an enterprise.

– Chapter 2: Metrics for Sustainability Assessment of Chemical Processes

The main objective of this chapter is to present the assessment methods to evaluate the performance of processes and systems considering criteria of sustainable development that could be applied in the preliminary stages of their design. It reinforces the systems-oriented approach emphasized in Chapter 1 and in particular, the importance of using systemic environmental management tools such as LifeCycle Assessment (LCA).

– Chapter 3: From Preliminary Projects to Projects

This chapter focuses on the various methods and tools that can be used in process synthesis, going from preliminary projects to projects. Special emphasis is given to process system engineering tools, and in particular to process flowsheeting simulators that have been largely used as decision-making tools for quite a long time. The coupling between such simulators and optimization methods, namely multi-objective methods for process eco-design is highlighted.

– Chapter 4: Analysis of the Strategy of the Enterprise and the Enterprise Strategic Plan

An industrial enterprise must review its strategy on a timely basis to take into account product aging and commercial, political, social and environmental changes country by country. The evaluation of the industrial assets versus the assets of competition (benchmarking), the performance, the location, and the commercial assessment based on the product market couple leads to the strategic action plan. Basic product cost and financial margin evaluation are given together with benchmarking, such as Boston Consulting Group (BCG) SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and site evaluation methods, which are essential tools for the evaluation and management of industrial assets.

– Chapter 5: Manufacturing Excellence: Operations Control

Manufacturing is a key function of the industrial enterprise that has been neglected for too long in many developed countries and its role in creating value has also been underestimated. The supply chain concept, the notion of flows (information, money, goods, people, etc.), and the understanding of process unit typology (value-added tax (VAT) analysis) have brought in a much needed vision for plant operations. WCM methods, lean manufacturing and Toyotism methods of problem solving for plant performance improvement are discussed. The most necessary score cards are developed that enable plant operators to monitor and improve their results.

– Chapter 6: Innovation and Change Management

Innovation, which differs from invention in the fact it creates a commercial advantage, has become an essential management style for many companies that want to be first-to-market. For this purpose, many techniques have been developed. Change management related to plant process operations is difficult due to the fact that it needs plant worker consensus and the acceptance of external people brought in for technical support. Engineers and professionals cannot ignore change management techniques.

– Chapter 7: Water and Energy Challenges

Water and energy are vital to the process industries. This chapter identifies some strategies and synergies that can be used to address this nexus. Several process systems engineering methodologies that have proved their efficiency in tackling some of these challenges are presented and illustrated through case studies.

– Chapter 8: Engineers as Key Players for Sustainability: the Role of PSE Academia

To achieve the goals of sustainable processes and systems, a new generation of engineers who are trained to adopt a systems-thinking approach is required. In this context, academia plays a fundamental role in developing future scientists and engineers who are able to drive sustainability into every part of the economy. The interdisciplinary dimensions, moving far beyond pluridisciplinary dimensions, will be important for the successful process engineer in the 21st Century.

– Chapter 9: Plant of the Future

This last chapter gives some thoughts about what is sometimes called plant of the future. There is not "one plant of the future" but many, depending on the involved technology, the size, the type of operations, the equipment, and so on. What is at stake are the following items: the optimization of capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX), new engineering methods and new cooperation between the project stakeholders. Equipment manufacturers are claiming for a new approach in equipment selection based on added value instead of only cost. Modular construction is described and its advantages are highlighted. Digital factory or the 4.0 factory approach cannot be ignored although it seems to suit the manufacturing discrete factory more. Operations abroad have specific features that must be addressed in this period of globalization. As expected, the plant of the future concept is very complex and multi-faceted. Guidelines are then given to select the design key success drivers that may contribute to building successful, innovative, flexible plants. It must be remembered that a human being is always in the center of the system. The plant of the future should be built for him and for the society he serves.

Finally, in conclusion, this book is an outgrowth of the melding of classical and new fundamentals and design skills. Another important aspect of this book is that it is also the result of the balance of industrial and academic experiences through the respective background of its authors. We hope that its content that mixes an academic approach (sustainable metrics for process evaluation, simulation, optimization and changes in pedagogical background) and practices in industrial management will provide materials for delivering this new message in a meaningful way and will contribute to preparing engineers for success in transition management for the 21st Century.

1 Meadows D.H., Meadows D.L., Randers J., et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972.

1

Project Management – Systems Engineering – the Industrialization Process

Enterprises have to adapt to a very changing world. They have to implement the decisions derived from their strategic analysis (see Chapter 4).

Over the past few decades, most enterprises, especially those in the Western world, have adopted a project management mode. Section 1.1 of this chapter will first define what a project is and then give some insights into project management. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 will cover systems engineering and the industrialization process, i.e. the set of processes needed to convert research and development (R&D) results into an industrial asset.

1.1. Projects and project management

1.1.1. Definitions

A project is a temporary activity with a beginning and an end, whose objective is to produce a unique result, a product or a service, called the scope of the project. A project is born and dies! A project is goal oriented. It can be:

– personal: lose weight, learn a foreign language, organize a trip, etc.;

– organizational: modify the IT system, hire an expert, acquire companies, set foot in some country, etc.;

– design a new product; build a bridge or a house, etc.

In the following, we deal mostly with physical or tangible projects, i.e. projects dealing with the creation of plants and industrial tools in general. A unique project can be repeated; a civil engineering company can be specialized in building bridges. Projects can vary largely in size and in cost from few thousand dollars to billions. They can be very simple like building a small storage tank or very complex. They may involve few people to many thousands. A project encompasses a certain number of tasks, which are the subdivisions of the project. These tasks are carried out in a rational way. For example, to build a house includes, among others, site preparation, constructing the walls, putting the roof up, etc. The roof cannot be installed before the walls are in place.

A work package is a group of tasks which can be performed by a specialized contractor, for example masonry, painting, electricity and others. Project management can be defined as precising what needs to be achieved – the project scope, putting in place (reuniting) human resources with various skills (the project team), finding financial resources, adequate equipment and materials, planning and controlling the work to keep it on track and reporting. Project management key success drivers are cost, quality and schedule.

Project management is not new! Building the pyramids in Egypt and the Eiffel tower in Paris required the utilization of project management techniques. However, project management took the shape it has today in the 1950s when the American administration launched a large number of programs of defense and space conquest; utilization of IT was decisive. A planning method like program evaluation and review technique (PERT) was developed by the US Navy for the Polaris missile project during that period. PERT is capable of planning and controlling a very large number of tasks.

Project management became an integral part of enterprise management, especially for enterprises working on a project to project basis, like civil engineering companies, professional congress organizers (PCOs) and engineering companies in general.

1.1.2. Project critical success factors

Project goal definition, i.e. the project scope, is well understood by all the project stakeholders (list of stakeholders has to be established). The project goal definition includes the following factors:

– project team organized with a project leader; an organization chart has to be outlined showing main functions, their relationship and names of people in charge;

– availability of adequate resources (human, financial, equipment, etc.);

– tasks definition with a planning;

– scope control in terms of cost, quality, schedule and management of change orders;

– project environment evaluation;

– risk management;

– management of crisis;

– overall project control via a steering committee;

– constraints assessment;

– adequate communication for the project team;

– reporting for the project stake holders on a timely basis;

– contracts of all kinds well defined upfront with contractors, customers, communities, raw materials suppliers, energy suppliers, etc.;

– respect of values (customers, contractors, country(ies), etc.);

– respect of regulations.

A project is considered successful when it is on time (i.e. schedule is met), on quality (i.e. expected performance is obtained within a specified period of time) and on budget (i.e. there is no budget overrun).

1.2. Systems engineering

Systems engineering finds its origin during World War II when the United States launched an unprecedented war effort and converted most of its industrial system, especially the car industry, to the manufacture of weapons. The Manhattan Project, the code name for an R&D project that manufactured atomic bombs, was a very complex engineering activity. NASA and the US Department of Defense’s very large and very complex projects were the reason for the development of systems engineering in the 1990s.

The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) was founded in 1990 by several US organizations.

Systems engineering can be defined as an interdisciplinary engineering discipline aimed at designing, realizing and managing systems successfully over their lifecycle. A system is successful if it satisfies customers’ and stakeholders’ needs, especially in terms of cost, quality and schedule.

Ludvig Von Bertalanffy (Vienna 1901–New York 1972) is considered to be the father of systems analysis.

images/c01_img_2_3.jpg

There are many definitions of systems. We propose the following one [BEN 98b]:

A system is a set of interrelated components working together toward some common objective or purpose. It is depicted in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. Illustration of a system

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It is clear from this figure that each component interacts with the others and impacts the system, and that the system has a boundary.

Let us take the case of a coal-fired steam generator. The system may include the coal storage, the burner, the demineralized water supply, the clinker system, the steam pipe, the stack, etc. The boundary may be extended to the coal supply by a barge, truck or train to the demineralized water process unit, to the steam piping system.

The boundary may be further extended to the total plant that uses the steam generated by the coal-fired generator.

One of the objectives of a system approach is to analyze its complexity. One component may be broken down into smaller components called subsystems. Let us take a highway. If the road itself can be considered as the main component, toll gates, gas stations, catering, patrol cars, information, etc., can be viewed as subsystems.

1.2.1. Systems classification

Some systems are considered as static, for example an office building is considered static from the civil engineering point of view. If we consider the same building during office hours, it becomes vibrant with people working, exchanging information, entering, leaving. It is considered as a dynamic system. Now, the building as a static system is aging as it is exposed to outside pollution, it needs heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC); is it really static?

A system can be designed as closed if it does not exchange much with its environment. It can be a small village in the middle of nowhere or a sealed reactor where chemicals can react. On the contrary, a city like New York is obviously an open system as a huge amount of energy, food, information and money cross its boundary with large variations during the day and night.

Some systems are natural like a mountain, a river, a forest, whereas humanmade, technical systems are the result of human activity like an airport, a chemical plant, etc.

Systems that we live in become more and more complex due to human intervention. Each citizen depends on multiple systems for living, transportation, working, communication, health care, education, entertainment, etc. Table 1.1 illustrates a systemic analysis of a city; it is far from being complete.

Table 1.1. Systemic analysis of a Town

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The following sections will focus on systems in use in the process industries, i.e. industries transforming materials and energy by chemical, physical or biological means. Systems engineering is a multi-disciplinary domain of chemical engineering.

1.3. The industrialization process

1.3.1. Definition: the industrialization steps

Industrialization can be defined as the set of processes that are required to move from research and studies to a production system, which is capable of delivering a product according to the predefined specifications and responds to a business requirement in accordance with the budget, timeline and the ethics of the company [DAL 12].

The transition from research and studies to construction consists of steps involving specific skills, techniques, diversified working methods and pluri-disciplinary teams (see Figure 1.2). The terminologies mostly come from the United States where they accompanied the extraordinary development of the petroleum and chemical industries in the 20th Century and the war effort necessitated by World War II.

Figure 1.2. The steps of the industrialization process

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After the development phase, which is an essential laboratory phase, the client designs the process in stages that take different names according to the companies: feasibility study or preliminary projects.

Depending on the case, starting from this step, the client in the process industries can make use of what is commonly known as an engineering department or engineering company.

The phases upstream from process engineering, where research is still very much involved, are less codified as they are still unclear and uncertain. A lot of material facts are missing. It takes considerable flair to understand the validity of the issues. The question is whether to continue or not! The various players in the field do not proceed in the same way, do not use the same terms and do not put the same contents into the same words.

Globalization and the extensive use of computers beginning in the 1960s have standardized the basic concepts regarding the vocation of engineering itself, which includes process engineering, basic engineering, detailed engineering and construction. We will further discuss these concepts later on.

1.3.2. Origin of projects – the initialization phase – preliminary projects

Here, we deal with physical or tangible projects, i.e. projects linked with factories or plants. The origin of projects is multiple. The strategic action plan is a major source of projects (see Chapter 4).

On a less informal basis, marketing and sales people often raise questions about the industrial function, often represented by the industrial director, questions of the following type:

– Can we increase product capacity from X to Y tons /year and at what cost?

– Can we have a purer product, formulated differently, in a new package, at what cost?

– Customers are not happy or are very happy with service provided (product quality, delivery time, etc.). What can we do to improve the situation or maintain it?

– What will it cost to manufacture product A in country B?

– Cost of product A at the plant is too expensive; selling it becomes more and more difficult, customers start buying elsewhere. What can be done about it?

– Always at stake are money, time and feasibility. Feasibility means how simple or complex is it to do. Can it be done rapidly? How long will it take to have at least an idea of feasibility? What are the chances of success? What are the risks of all kinds?

What business people look for is gains and customer satisfaction; the two are interrelated. To initiate the study and during the initialization phase, the industrial function needs more information from the business:

– the quantities to be manufactured (volumes, tonnages) over time;

– the average selling price: adequacy between volumes and selling prices;

– the specifications of the finished product;

– the expected lifetime of the product.

The expected tonnage and the number of manufacturing steps will strongly influence the characteristics of the production facility and therefore the strategy to be implemented. The enterprise can move either from a pilot plant to one or a series of multipurpose plants, to a dedicated installation, or from a batch process unit to a continuous process unit.

Quality in a broad sense (performance) is a permanent concern, first because it should be achieved during the start-up, and second because any change may alter the process and thus the installation.

Problems as mundane as bulk or drum shipment alone can heavily weigh down the total amount of investment if it becomes necessary to add a packaging line, a warehouse or storage bins or silos.

At the beginning, most projects, or studies, are fuzzy. At the beginning of the initialization phase, their scope is not clear, not defined. A lot of questions receive no answer. Many projects die as quickly as they were born. Industrial people need some flair to detect the importance of the request and to determine if resources have to be dedicated to give an appropriate response.

A lot of confusion stems from the usage of the words study and project. In our mind, a project means that the credits are allocated or that the probability to have them allocated (in construction process) is high. Generally, a project starts at the basic engineering stage (see Figure 1.2). Meanwhile, a study refers to the upstream steps.

Nevertheless, if we consider a large R&D study like the very costly ones involved in the development of a medicine, for the R&D department it is a project because credits have been allocated and many people are dedicated to a defined task. For the engineering department, it is a study because nothing has to be materialized into a plant.

Front End Loading (FEL) refers to all information needed at the feasibility stage or preliminary stage to maximize the chances of success in the downstream stage, which is process engineering. In other words, appropriate FEL is important to minimize the risk of wasting money in studies that provide no outcome.

The chapter Foundations of Process Industrialization by Jean-François Joly in [DAL 12] give some basic information on the R&D stage.

Some projects do not need research work; they start at the project engineering stage. This is the case for most maintenance capital projects dealing with compliance to regulations, equipment improvement and plant expansion.

1.3.3. Industrialization steps. Typical costs and relevant documents – time scale

Initialization

Initialization is the source of the project. The company is interested in a concept and a vision of the future. It is followed by feasibility studies and preliminary projects.

Bases of industrialization or process development

Foundations of process industrialization, written by Jean-François Joly in [DAL 12], describes the work done in the laboratory to establish the bases of industrialization in detail. In a few words, this step consists of the acquisition of data necessary for the preliminary definition of industrial equipment and its operation. Chemical kinetics, diffusion, mass