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| Ross E. Swaney |
| Ross E. Swaney Associate Professor and Vilas Research Associate |
| 2008 Engineering Hall 1415 Engineering Drive Madison, WI 53706 |
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Tel: 608/262-3641 E-mail: swaney@engr.wisc.edu |
Selected Awards, Honors and Societies
Our research develops advanced techniques for chemical process systems design. These include strategies for design synthesis, modeling, and optimization, and the development of new software tools for computer-aided design.
Process Synthesis and Optimization: Defining the process configuration often has the greatest impact on the resulting design's performance. However, this aspect of the design process is only partially understood, and engineering practice must rely upon intuition, rules-of-thumb and trial-and-error. The research objective is to deduce and construct a scientific basis for synthesis of the process flowsheet configuration. Optimal designs are not random, but are based on powerful underlying principles. With proper insight, these principles can be discovered and embodied in network synthesis models. Mathematical programming procedures can then be applied to determine the optimal configurations.
Separation systems are our current focus. The goal is to determine optimal flowsheet structures by deriving the best overall integrated heat and mass transfer flow networks based on fundamental thermodynamic criteria. While the scope of this approach includes the class of standard process configurations, it should further allow the invention of new, non-standard configurations and hybrid processes.
Process Modeling and Optimization Systems: Process modeling and optimization calculations are a mainstay in process engineering and design. However, current software packages lack the convergence reliability, modeling flexibility and computation capabilities that are desired.
A major objective is to develop robust yet practical techniques for solving modeling and optimization problems involving the large systems of nonlinear equations that form process system models. Our current research looks at exploiting physical variational principles together with techniques of global optimization. Methods are being developed that will automatically compute solutions to complex models without requiring initial guesses or user intervention. These will be essential components of next-generation modeling packages that generate robust numerical software automatically.
Design Under Uncertainty: The problem here is how to design a process that will perform well in spite of uncertainties and limitations in the accuracy of process models and the data on which they are based. This is a very important real-world concern but engineers at present have few support tools, and must rely heavily on prior experience, conservative overdesign and intuition.
We are working on aspects of thermodynamic properties modeling: quantification of uncertainties, analyzing their impact on process design, optimizing design with uncertainty tolerance built in, and the inverse problem of determining when additional data are needed and what the best experimental conditions will be.
Geometric Design Synthesis: The economic optimality of a chemical processing system often can be influenced by the structure and geometry of the material flow and containment scheme employed. The goal is to develop computational methods that can determine the optimal shapes and three-dimensional arrangement of the process components. A related objective is to develop a structured way to account for these geometric considerations at the levels of flowsheet synthesis and parametric optimization.
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Copyright 2006 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Date last modified: Wednesday, 08-Sep-1999 13:04:32 CDT Date created: 16-Aug-1999 Content by: swaney@engr.wisc.edu Thank you for visiting /che/faculty/swaney_ross.html |
