The chemical manufacturing industry is experiencing a shift from the development and manufacture of bulk commodity chemicals to the design and manufacture of specialty high value-added chemical products.¹ This emerging industry reality implies greater challenge to achieving the desired product quality while keeping cost at a minimum. The new market situation also creates new demands on existing product design approaches,since much of the work in chemical product design is multi-disciplinary in nature and involves time consuming experimentation². Consequently, opportunities for cost reduction now extend beyond process design and optimization efforts to include product design and product development. In contrast to bulk chemicals, specialty chemicals are more susceptible to performance variability resulting from a number of factors such as lack of standard performance indices or quantitative methods for measuring end-use quality factors. Moreover, the emergence of global markets has brought about the need for rapid change and has significantly increased the range of uncertainty and variable application conditions for most products. This new environment has created a demand for an efficient product design framework that integrates robust enhancement techniques and ensures that optimal product performance is achieved at minimal cost.

The objective of this work is to develop a systematic framework that supports the generation of an optimal set of robust product design alternatives. The approach focuses on end-use application-based product design, and employs a mechanism that relates the functional requirements of the product to its properties. This capability, which relies on expert knowledge, is particularly useful when designing consumer-oriented products that involve satisfying a wide variety of functional requirements. An end-use application based product design emphasizes the interactions between technology and marketing domains throughout the product design and development process. This approach also ensures that the critical technical attributes of the product are strongly influenced by consumer preferences. The proposed framework also provides a procedure for deriving the utility function which incorporates consideration of the product attributes in determining the worth of the particular product alternative. A multi-objective optimization formulation is used to balance the tradeoff between product cost and product performance, while simultaneously ensuring minimization of performance variation.

In contrast to other approaches to chemical product design found in the literature² , the proposed framework incorporates robust design techniques, to address variation in the design domain, and considers the economic feasibility of the product alternative. Furthermore, the approach acknowledges the multidisciplinary nature of chemical product design² by integrating technology and marketing functions. This is done by accounting for both engineering performance and consumer preferences in the problem formulation that leads to the generation of a feasible set of product alternatives.

We illustrate this framework by reviewing the design of a consumer-oriented product. The result indicates that the proposed systematic framework attains optimal solutions that are robust to variation in design variables and noise parameters.

Reference:

(1)Cussler, E.L. and Moggride, G.D., Chemical Product Design, Cambridge University Press , Cambridge, 2001

(2)Gani R., Chemical Product Design: Challenges and Opportunities, Computer and Chemical Engineering 28 (2004) pp 2441-2457