Optimal Design Approaches for Cost-Effective Manufacturing and Deployment of Chemical Process Families with Economies of Numbers

Developing methods for rapid, large-scale deployment of carbon capture systems is critical for meeting climate change goals. Optimization-based decisions can be employed at the design and manufacturing phases to minimize the costs of deployment and operation. Manufacturing standardization results in significant cost savings due to economies of numbers. Building on previous work, we present a process family design approach to design a set of carbon capture systems while explicitly including economies of numbers savings within the formulation. Our formulation optimizes both the number and characteristics of the common components in the platform and simultaneously designs the resulting set of carbon capture systems. Savings from economies of numbers are explicitly included in the formulation to determine the number of components in the platform. We show and discuss the savings we gain from economies of numbers.