Optimal design of biogas supply chains

The current work addresses a methodology for the optimal design of biogas supply chains based on anaerobic digestion of animal manure. The problem formulation allows the utilization of optimized processing plants that have been previously designed within a generic superstructure-based optimization problem. The definition of the plant capacity is performed based on the raw biomass availability as well as the demand profiles. Thus, these plants, carrying information on their capacity, investment and operating costs as well as their energetic input and outputs can be used as building blocks within an MILP optimization framework that aims to optimally place the plants with respect to total cost minimization. The latter is subject to constraints related to the application domain, biomass availability and end products demand. The spatial identification of the processing plants is performed taking into account the potential synegies between them, in the form of energy exchanges between the units as well as the consideration of storage locations. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.