Synthesis of resource conservation network for the clay bath system in palm oil mills

This work 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 solid separation based on density differences. In the present study, the clay bath is modeled as a semi-batch unit with dynamic changes. This is different from previous works where the clay bath is treated as a continuous unit with constant feed and effluent flow rates. The design problem is formulated as a nonlinear program based on a superstructure, with the objective function to minimize fresh resource consumption.