A general overview on biorefineries and cost estimation methods is presented to provide background knowledge needed to create software focused on comparing different biorefinery configurations. The software is implemented in Microsoft Excel 2003 and can account for the capital cost, operating...

Energy plays a vital role in the world today, driving industry and allowing for technologies ingrained throughout the routines of daily life. The complex interactions, evolution, long time scales of change, and critical nature of the energy system makes modeling and analysis crucial to...

A novel operational policy, the Process Intermediate Storage (PIS) operational policy, is introduced and used to synthesize, schedule and design multipurpose batch plants. The model is based on the State Sequence Network (SSN) and non-uniform discretization of the time horizon of interest model...

Biopharmaceutical companies are under constant pressure to deliver double-digit growth. In traditional markets such as the U.S., Japan, and the European Union growth is stagnant, and profit margins are falling due to increased price pressure from governments. As a result companies are looking to...

Over the past century the Pharmaceutical industry has evolved from an "outback garage" industry to a highly competitive, technology-driven, organized industry, churning out highly valuable drug products that have played a key role in vastly improving our quality of life and healthcare. But today...

Competition requires companies to make decisions that satisfy multiple criteria. Considering profitability alone is no longer sufficient. Ignoring environmental considerations will not only expose a company to potential regulatory costs, but also damaged public image, both of which in turn have...

In historical perspective, both the nature of and arrangements for the generation of engineering knowledge have evolved over the past 150 years. We examine the historical development of the search for ‘useful knowledge’ in agriculture, aeronautics and chemical engineering during the first...

In a typical decentralized supply chain, i.e., one with multiple loci of control, the dependencies between the entities are formalized through contracts. The parameters over which contracts are observed in a typical buyer-seller system include price, periodicity of ordering, quantity...

The overriding objective of diagnostic assessment is change. Assessment processes are a mechanism to identify areas that merit change. In order to maximize the possibility that a company will adopt recommended changes following a diagnostic assessment, the assessment process itself must be...

In managing economic risks, it is necessary for a company in the process industries to allow for uncertainties in the amount of each product that can be sold, how much material is available for production, as well as prices and costs. The goal is to optimize a company's profit criterion without...

Better metallurgical accounting practices are achieved through implementation of robust and accurate analytical techniques, in particular the sample preparation techniques involved, as well as characterization of all possible errors associated with such techniques and those associated with the...

Distillation has been known and practiced since antiquity, and it remains by far the most widely used separation process in the chemical and allied industries. In this dissertation, a comprehensive self-contained geometric theory of multicomponent distillation is developed. The theory is...