Sustainable Plantwide Optimizing Control for an Acrylic Acid Process

This paper presents a sustainable control strategy from a plantwide control (PWC) perspective. The proposed strategy is subjected to testing within an operational environment of an acrylic acid plant. To integrate sustainability tools into the plantwide optimizing control (PWOC) formulation, the present proposal suggests the utilization of green chemistry principles. These principles will be incorporated as constraints within the optimization problem. A comparative analysis is conducted between the proposed sustainable PWOC approach and two alternative structures: a PWOC framework that does not take sustainability issues into account and a conventional PWC structure. The findings indicate that the sustainable PWOC demonstrates superior economic performance from a financial standpoint, reaching the highest cumulative profitability(1.6274 × 10⁵ USD), exceeding 11.94% in comparison to the PWOC without sustainability concerns, which reach a cumulative profitability of 1.4330 × 10⁵ USD, and surpassing 13.01% when compared to the decentralized PWC approach, which reach a cumulative profitability of 1.4158 × 10⁵ USD. Additionally, the sustainable PWOC demonstrated a reduced emission impact on the process, with a decrease of 6.17% compared to the unsustainable PWOC and a 9.79% decrease compared to the decentralized approach. This demonstrates that the incorporation of the proposed green chemistry metrics as an explicit component of the formulated PWC problem significantly mitigates the impacts of global warming and human health.