110th Anniversary: On the Departure from Heuristics and Simplified Models toward Globally Optimal Design of Process Equipment

Despite the large advances in computational tools attained by the Process Systems Engineering community, industry for the most part still performs basic design of process equipment using trial-and-verification procedures guided by heuristic rules. In this opinion article, we present a discussion on how to depart from the use of these heuristics-based procedures, most step-by-step, sometimes computer-aided. We believe that there are direction changes, some incipient and some in full development already, toward the use of optimization tools for the task. The academic literature is dominated by mixed-integer nonlinear models, solved using different techniques (mostly stochastic or mathematical programming-based). These procedures have practical limitations that have hindered the migration of practitioners away from current heuristics and simplified model-based tools. We discuss these drawbacks and propose solutions. We first show how the use of commercially available discrete values of the design geometrical...