ABSTRACT

Mixing is a very common industrial process; the resulting mixture may be either a final or an intermediate product of predetermined content for each constituent, according to certain quality specifications. During production within an agro-industrial complex, external inventories, distributed in the time/space domain, hosting raw materials (usually highly inhomogeneous and sensitive by nature) should cater for internal ones that feed the mixer. The present work aims to the computer-aided integration of such a combined industrial process by (a) continuously allocating transhipment points and determining the optimal routing of raw materials, (b) maintaining steady-state conditions in the reactor, (c) constantly calibrating the mixture proportions through a feedback control mechanism checking the quality standards at the reactor output and (d) obtaining the minimal operating cost provided through a custom-developed software module based on a hybrid Genetic Algorithm. A case study is also presented referring to the design of an ethanol production unit located at Crete in Greece where the number of inventories varies.