In any chemical plant, the flare stacks are installed primarily for minimizing the total amount of toxic, combustible and potent greenhouse gases (such as methane) emitted during the plant’s lifetime. To this end, it is imperative to always maintain effective flaring with the support of standby(s) despite probable “shocks,” e.g., sudden flare failures and/or abrupt changes in the total flowrate of organic gases to be vented. A novel mathematical programming model, which incorporates considerations for the aforementioned random shocks, has been rigorously derived in the present work to characterize and optimize of any standby-integrated flare design. The optimal flare designs can be generated efficiently by solving this generalized model with genetic algorithm.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.