Improving the sustainability of porcelain tile manufacture by flowsheet simulation

Porcelain tiles manufacturing is energy-intensive since it contains several stages in which the product is subjected to thermal treatments. The energy used in the process mainly comes from the combustion of natural gas, pushing the industry to decrease its consumption to upkeep its competitiveness in the coming targets of modern sustainable policies. This work presents a simulation-based strategy for the holistic optimization of energy consumption in the tile manufacturing process. Mechanistic models for all involved processing units, describing the respective thermal and electrical energy consumptions, have been implemented in the Dyssol framework and validated against available experimental data. The energy consumption optimization procedure was performed using a coupled Dyssol-Matlab framework. The proposed cost function, which considered electric and thermal energies, was used as the main criterion to determine the optimal design set of process parameters. Various optimization approaches to minimize the overall cost function and the required computational time have been compared. The proposed strategy allows the computing of improved process parameters resulting in minimization of energy consumption and CO2 emissions while keeping product quality intact. Among the solutions, a reduction of 30.2% of fuel per ton of fired tile can be obtained with modification of the processing parameters.