In this paper

a new optimization method——chaos optimization combined with exact non-differentiable penalty function is proposed for solving chemical process optimization problems which are often regarded as nonlinear constraint optimization problems.The construction of the non-differentiable penalty function is convenient

and chaos optimization method does not need continuity and differentiability of the optimization problems

so the constraint optimization problems can be first transformed into non-constraint ones by virtue of non-differentiable penalty function

and then be solved by chaos search method. The newly proposed method is applied to benzene-toluene flash vaporization process optimization for simulation study. Results show that

the new method is not only simple and easy to implement

but also has both high accuracy and reliability. It is an effective way for solving chemical process optimization problems.