A ROBUST COMBINATORIAL APPROACH BASED ON P-GRAPH FOR SUPERSTRUCTURE GENERATION IN DOWNSTREAM BIOPROCESSES

Abstract In the production of chemicals from fermentation, the cost of downstream purification constitutes the major portion of the total production cost. Since the bioprocess generally contains a large amount of biochemical separation units, its flowsheets are complex. How to generate the rigorous superstructure of the downstream bioprocess is a primary problem and key step. In this work, a robust combined approach based on the P-graph was proposed to generate the rigorous superstructure of the downstream process of fermentation. This method integrates the hierarchical decomposition of the heuristics with P-graph-based algorithm MSG with the advantages including: (1) Different design flowsheets could be evaluated simultaneously; (2) An unique bipartite graph, P-graph, was introduced, which could represent the maximum structure clearly and intuitively; (3) The rigorous superstructure could be automatically generated. The validity of the present method was verified with two practical bioprocesses. Results show that the effective processes and the adequate operation units could be determined in the beginning stage of the design, and the tedious reforming steps during process synthesis could be avoided.