Reliability Integration to Process Synthesis applied to GTL Processes

Abstract This work presents a simplified steady state reliability model to estimate the variation in stream days due to structural changes in a process and makes a trade-off with process efficiency and cost. The model does not consider simultaneous failures in different parts of the process, leading to an error of less than 1 % point in the plant reliability. The main variables to manipulate are number of equipment in parallel and individual capacity. The model has been implemented in Excel for developing understanding and validation as well as in AIMMS for integration with the existing superstructure for GTL process synthesis. The model setup and approach can be applied to any process: an application is defined by the data used and configuration. An application to GTL yields a reduced cost at the expense of slight decrease in number of stream days.