Abstract
Process synthesis is one of the dominant research areas in chemical engineering. How-
ever, the development of general synthesis method is very difficult because the problems are usually
formulated as complex combinatorial programming problems. One of the promising methods is to
use a superstructure that includes all of the candidate structures in it for modelling. In this paper,
two process synthesis problems of distillation processes are modeled by using superstructures. These
problems are finally formulated as LP and/or MILP problems, and solved by a commercial solver.
The results of these two problems show that there is high possibility to create new process structures
that are difficult to imagine by human experience.
