Page 430 - Design of Simple and Robust Process Plants

10.3 The Design of High-quality Plants 417
Logistic management has the opportunity to build up experience with just-in-
time production to reduce storage and its facilities. Existing plants can benefit from
these opportunities to reduce working capital, and give the storage facilities another
destination.

Summary
Continuous improvements of plants require on going performance tracking and
activities to realize progress. The area's requiring specific attention are; capacity,
reliability, quality of operation, operation optimization, design improvements.
. Capacity improvements are achieved by systematically identification and eva-
luation of constraints in the area of; market, logistics, plant availability and
reliability mechanical as well as process wise , product quality.
. Reliability improvements ask for grass root analysis of failures including
planned process outages and proposals for improvements
. Quality of operation based on the concept of hands-off operation requires
analysis of all operation manipulations on the panel and in the field, and eva-
luation for improvements.
. Operation optimization are achievable by installation of a performance
(profit) meter and optimization models for; scheduling, off / closed loop opti-
mization.
. Incremental design improvements can be easily identified with optimization
models as these push operation against its constraints, and incremental
opportunities can be quantified by elimination of selected constraints.

10.3
The Design of High-quality Plants

During the last decade, many challenges have arisen within the engineering envi-
ronment, but these can be grouped into three different challenges:
1. The design of low-cost and high-quality chemical plants, at design capacity.
2. Build and engineer the facility within planned cost (budget), on time and
with a demonstrated 100% capacity within a few months after start-up.
3. Design and engineer the facility at low cost and in a short time period.
The low cost of a high-quality plant is specifically addressing the capital cost. It has
been shown that the capital of a plant, including its logistics, can be reduced by 30%
compared with conventional designs by the application of simple and robust design
principles (see Chapter 3) (Koolen, 1998).
The quality of a plant is of crucial importance, especially when we realize that
the lifetime is somewhere between 20 and 40 years for a basic chemical plant.
Under quality, we understand a high-performance plant with respect to selectivity
and unit ratios, reliability, safety, environmental compliance and ease of operation.
Such a plant is also called a competitive process. The realization of the quality