Process diagrams versus MFA diagrams

material-flow-analysis-001
Source:  Andreas Bode, Roman Kühner, Thomas Wisniewski, 2011. Identification of economic potentials in production processes: An industrial case study.

This diagram is technically a process diagram, as it uses icons to represent various processes in an industrial process, however, it is interesting to compare to a Material Flow Analysis diagram, as the graphic languages are rather similar.

2 comments:

  1. I guess you could also call it a material flow diagram and the similarity to MFA gets even more obvious. I saw the same diagram in "Chemie Ingenieur Technik" (CIT) where the authors describe how they do cost analysis based on these diagrams using the software Umberto (paper DOI: 10.1002/cite.201100107). That CIT issue (Vol. 83 Issue 10) is actually a special issue on material and energy flow analysis. Unfortunately in German language only, but the English speaking journal "Chemical Engineering and Technology" published an interesting special issue on the same topic back in 2010 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ceat.v33:4/issuetoc).

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