Synthesis of property-based resource conservation network in palm oil mills with time-varying process disturbance

This article presents a mathematical model for resource conservation in a palm oil milling process via property integration. The focus is given to the clay bath system for kernel/shell separation based on flotation principle. In the present study, the clay bath separator is considered as a semi-batch unit under time-dependent process disturbance. This is different from previous works where it is simplified as a continuous unit. The design problem can be formulated as a nonlinear program based on a superstructure approach, with the objective set to minimize the fresh resource consumption. An illustrative case study is solved to demonstrate the proposed model.