Technical, Economic, and Sustainability Evaluation Integrated with PI System Monitoring: A Case Study on Different...

Process optimization, monitoring, and control play important roles in chemical plants. In an ever-changing environment related to climate concerns, reducing costs, keeping the product's quality, producing more, and finding eco-friendly solutions are crucial to a company's financial stability. Therefore, technical-economic techniques are often applied to verify the feasibility of those practices. Alternative scenarios on process configurations of acetone production via the dehydrogenation of isopropyl alcohol are the object of study of this work. A temperature optimization case study in the reactor was executed to evaluate the possibility of increasing the production. An economic analysis was performed for each scenario, comparing them and evaluating their attractiveness. To simulate as if they were a real and live plant, a PI System environment was developed, creating a dashboard for variables, key process indicators (KPIs), and process anomalies monitoring, and sending alerts if needed. The combined energy source change and temperature optimization scenario made the process economically feasible, increasing revenues by 5.2% and reducing production costs by 0.26%, achieving a net present value (NPV) of US$4.63 M (372% higher than the baseline). This work is a demonstration of how associating process data with a data historian and analyzer allows live testing, enhances safety, and deepens KPI monitoring.