Optimal Design of Membrane Cascades for Gaseous and Liquid Mixtures via MINLP

TL;DR

This paper develops a MINLP model to optimally design membrane cascades for gas and liquid separations, minimizing energy use while addressing non-convexity and solver challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MINLP formulation with cuts to improve convergence for optimal membrane cascade design, validated against experimental data.

Findings

Accurately predicts experimental separation data

Cuts improve solver convergence within 5% optimality gap

Provides a practical tool for energy-efficient membrane design

Abstract

Given the growing concern of reducing CO2 emissions, it is desirable to identify, for a given separation carried out through a membrane cascade, the optimum design that yields the lowest energy consumption. Nevertheless, designing a membrane cascade is challenging since, there are often multiple feasible configurations that differ in their energy consumption and cost. In this work, we develop a Mixed Integer Non-linear Program (MINLP) that, for a given binary separation, which may be either liquid or gaseous, finds the cascade and its operating conditions that minimize energy consumption. To model the separation at each membrane in the cascade, we utilize the analytical solution of a system of differential and algebraic equations derived from the crossflow model and the solution-diffusion theory. We provide numerical evidence which shows that our single-stage membrane model accurately predicts experimental data. Unfortunately, the resulting membrane model is non-convex and, even state-of-the-art solvers struggle to prove global optimality of the cascades and the operating conditions identified. In this paper, we derive various cuts that help with relaxation quality and, consequently, accelerate convergence of branch-and-bound based solvers. More specifically, we demonstrate, on various examples, that our cuts help branch-and-bound solvers converge within 5\% optimality gap in a reasonable amount of time and such a tolerance level was not achieved by a simple formulation of the membrane model. The proposed optimization model is an easy-to-use tool for practitioners and researchers to design energy efficient membrane cascades.