This repository hosts various files for my Process Design Project for University for it was recommended we version control the project. Most of the files are in Greek due to it being the language the lesson is taught in. The subject is “Utilization of Olive Kernels for the production of Glycerol and Cyclopentanone”. Glycerol is produced microbially from cellulose (using Candida glycerinogenes as the microorganism), Cyclopentanone is produced from hydrogenation of furfural a product of acid treatment of xylose (coming from the hemicellulosic part of the biomass) while lignin is used in a rankine cycle for the production of heat and electricity.
In the top level folder of the repository are the various .org files (markup format similar to .md) I have which are notes of mine for the project. The initial notes about the subject which are mostly conceptional on how to produce these reside in my ~/org_roam directory (where most of my digital notes are). Therefore, it would be bothersome to move them here. With the help of my project zetteldesk.el I have created a file (process_design_project_notes.org) which stores all my org_roam notes related to the project. This file is also available in pdf version to leverage all the latex features it uses which Github does not display correctly.
There are however a lot of other files in this top level describing core parts of the process such as mass balances, economic feasibility, energy integration, some modeling info needed in Aspen and some calculation for the bioreactor.
In the /Diagrams folder are various .svg files created with Inkscape which are relevant to the project. Some of them are also exported to .pdf or .png
In the /Calculations folder are various Excel and Matlab files used for calculations needed for the project. Experimentally, some Julia files have also been added as I am trying to learn the language currently.
In the /Aspen folder are AspenPLUS files we have used for simulations of the process. Following the .apwz files (aspen files) are in some cases .org documents documenting the process.
In the /LCA folder are all the files for the life cycle analysis of the project which was conducted for a different lesson taking a subset of the process and using the Aspen as an LCI.
Then, there are folders for all the exams of the assignment. The first one was about different ideas for how to approach the process, but since the idea proposed there was not the one we used in the end, the files are not in the repo. The second exam includes a lot of information about the process we ended up doing such as reactor desing, which separators should be used and kinetics. It is the fundamentals of the process basically. In the third exam, the focus was mainly on getting the core parts of the process simulated in AspenPLUS. In the fourth exam, we tried to complete the process flow sheet by including everything that we envisioned, to lead up to the first semester’s final exam where we structured the whole process using a block diagram concept explained here and in the various files of that folder. The requirements for this was to have a complete working simulation of the base process and to be able to present it in a good way. After this, are the folders for the exams of the second semester. The first is about energy production in the process as well as energy integration, with a goal of using the minimum energy possible and producing all of it inside the process from the combustion of lignin, while the second attempts to complete the energy integration of the process and gives a first look at the costing. Lastly, there is the second semester’s final exam which shows the complete picture of the process, its integration, the proposed heat exchanger network based on this integration and the complete image of the process costing with important conclusions.
The two final exams were also presented. The presentation files can be found here for the first semester and here for the second.
A big part of how these were created is in the other files of the repository, from which most of the info was drawn. But these exam files try to take everything researched up to that point and put it together to be presented.