Publications

R&D Areas/Projects

• Development of efficient strategies to model and simulate various petroleum engineering processes (primarily, staged separation processes, and processes having reactive systems) have been of interest to me always. In staged separation processes, the recent trend is more towards installing packed columns, and revamping the existing staged columns for improving their separation efficiency and minimising the operating costs. Energy recovery through Heat Integration of processes has always been important to process engineers. However, with ever increasing costs of fuel and utilities (and their limited availability), systematic procedures are now very much needed to analyse an existing design using a thermodynamic approach which could enable the designer/process engineer to come out with process schemes that will be more energy efficient. Processes which involve highly exothermic reactions, if properly Heat Integrated, can tend towards Zero-Energy Processes. In this direction, some research work on use of Exergy Analysis for an Ammonia Plant, and a Sulfuric Acid Plant has already been done by my students recently.
• Energy analysis of distillation columns for improving their performance, and for exploring the possibilities of a systematic process integration, has been a subject of my recent research in collaboration with Prof. U.V. Shenoy (see, Bandyopadhyay et al., 1998).
• Over the past several years, a dedicated simulator called AmmSimTOP has been developed by my group at CAD Centre which includes rigorous models for practically all the units encountered in a typical Ammonia Plant [Reformers, Shift Converters, Synthesis Converters (of various types), Carbon di-oxide Absorption-Regeneration Systems, Purge Gas Recovery Units]. The simulator has been customised and delivered to several Ammonia Plants operating in India. A dedicated simulator for Urea Plants (fluid handling section only) has recently been developed by my team using rigorous models of key units and thermodynamic procedures. Efforts are on to enhance and strengthen the capabilities of these two simulators.
• Other areas in which I am interested in pursuing research work are Computer Aided Process Engineering (Data Modelling, in particular), On-line Optimisation Strategies, and Optimisation Algorithms for sequential and simultaneous simulators.