Designing, Modeling and Simulating a New Plant Producing Coal-Derived "Green" Products

As many institutions are moving towards decarbonization, the coal industry is slowly declining and exploring new markets. During the last three years, teams from The George Washington University and Mississippi State University have worked on a joint research program that aims to produce three new environmentally friendly products derived from coal. These patented products could potentially revitalize the coal industry. However, there is currently no existing production plant design, which is paramount to succeeding in this new market. The production plant consists of three production lines, one for each product. Every production line is unique and creates products with different properties using the same raw material. However, some processing units are used repeatedly by the same production line or even different production lines, while the project budget currently only allows the purchase and operation of one processing unit of each type. A plant design was laid out to represent the processing unit availability in the plant while meeting the specifications of each production line. The design was then modeled using the simulation software Simio to create a prototype of the real-life plant. The simulation of this model projected the production performance of the plant under the current design conditions. Three new alternative models were then simulated to explore productivity variations resulting from the addition of production silos to the plant. Production silos were demonstrated as an effective technique to increase productivity and utilization of specific processing units, while maintaining the same processing unit availability and staying within the budget.