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Guidelines For Modification and Improvement of Established Processes

The document provides guidelines for modifying and improving established chemical processes. It outlines considerations related to process economics, plant safety, reliability, and environmental impact. Specific guidelines address improving reactor selectivity and yield, energy efficiency, and reducing capital costs. For plant reliability, it recommends assessing common equipment failures and more reliable alternatives. Regarding environmental impact, it suggests using safer catalysts and reactors, eliminating hazardous materials, and adopting closed-loop systems. Additional heuristics provide tips for chemical reactions, mixing and recycling, separation techniques, and managing temperature, pressure and phase changes.

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Pamela Baticulon Villanueva
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52 views20 pages

Guidelines For Modification and Improvement of Established Processes

The document provides guidelines for modifying and improving established chemical processes. It outlines considerations related to process economics, plant safety, reliability, and environmental impact. Specific guidelines address improving reactor selectivity and yield, energy efficiency, and reducing capital costs. For plant reliability, it recommends assessing common equipment failures and more reliable alternatives. Regarding environmental impact, it suggests using safer catalysts and reactors, eliminating hazardous materials, and adopting closed-loop systems. Additional heuristics provide tips for chemical reactions, mixing and recycling, separation techniques, and managing temperature, pressure and phase changes.

Uploaded by

Pamela Baticulon Villanueva
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Guidelines for Modification

and Improvement of
Established Processes
Engr. Gino Apollo M. Guerrero
Guidelines
● Process Economics
● Improve reactor selectivity and process yield
● Improve process energy efficiency
● Improve process fixed costs
● Reduce capital investment
● Reduce working capital
● Plant Safety
Guidelines
● Plant Reliability
● Reliability Problems
● Equipment Failures
● Common equipment failures

● Solid handling equipment

● Rotating equipments (pumps and compressors)

● Heat exchangers prone to fouling

● Instruments and valves

● Specifying a more reliable piece of equipment


Guidelines
● Environmental Impact
● Use of new catalysts, enzymes of organisms that have better
selectivity for the desired product and subsequently lead to
less waste formation
● Optimization of reactor design to give better mixing or heat
transfer and hence improve reactor selectivity and reduce
by-product formation
● Elimination of solvents or other consumables that become
degraded to wastes products by the process
Guidelines
● Environmental Impact
● Elimination of materials that have high environmental
impact
● Adoption of closed-loop recirculating gas systems to reduce
VOC emissions
● Substitution of chemicals with materials that have reduced
environmental impact
Heuristics
Chemical Reactions
● Select raw materials and chemical reactions to avoid, or
reduce, the handling and storage of hazardous and toxic
chemicals
Mixing and Recycle
● Use an excess of one chemical reactant in a reaction
operation to consume completely a valuable, toxic, or
hazardous chemical reactant. The MSDS will indicate
which chemicals are toxic and hazardous.
Mixing and Recycle
● When nearly pure products are required, eliminate inert
species before the reaction operations when the
separations are easily accomplished and when the catalyst
is adversely affected by the inert, but not when a large
exothermic heat of reaction must be removed.
Mixing and Recycle
● Introduce purge streams to provide exits for species that
enter the process as impurities in the feed or are formed in
irreversible side reactions, when these species are in trace
quantities and/or are difficult to separate from the other
chemicals. Lighter species leave in vapor purge streams,
and heavier species exit in liquid purge streams.
Mixing and Recycle
● Do not purge valuable species or species that are toxic and
hazardous, even in small concentrations. Add separators to
recover valuable species. Add reactors to eliminate, if
possible, toxic and hazardous species.
Mixing and Recycle
● Byproducts that are produced in reversible reactions, in
small quantities, are usually not recovered in separators or
purged. Instead, they are usually recycled to extinction.
Mixing and Recycle
● For competing reactions, both in series and parallel, adjust
the temperature, pressure and catalyst to obtain high yields
of the desired products. In the initial distribution of
chemicals, assume that these conditions can be satisfied.
Before developing a base-case design, obtain kinetics data
and check this assumption.
Mixing and Recycle
● For reversible reactions especially, consider conducting
them in a separation device capable of removing the
products, and hence driving the reactions to the right. Such
reaction-separation operations lead to very different
distributions of chemicals.
Separation
● Attempt to condense or partially condense vapor mixtures
with cooling water or refrigerant.
● Separate liquid mixtures using distillation, stripping,
enhanced distillation, liquid-liquid extraction,
crystallization, and/or adsorption.
Separation
● Separate vapor mixtures using partial condensation,
cryogenic distillation, absorption, adsorption, membrane
separation or desublimation.
Separation
● Crystallize inorganic chemicals from a concentrated
aqueous solution by chilling when solubility decreases
significantly with decreasing temperature, and
crystallization by evaporation if the opposite is true.
● Separate organic chemicals by melt crystallization with
cooling, using suspension crystallization, followed by
removal of crystals by settling, filtration or centrifugation.
Temperature, pressure and phase
change
● To remove a highly exothermic or endothermic heat of
reaction, consider the use of excess reactant, an inert
diluents, or cold shots.
Temperature, pressure and phase
change
● For less exothermic or endothermic heats of reaction, use
an external cooler or heater, use cooling or heating coils,
or use intercoolers or interheaters between adiabatic
reaction stages, wherever applicable.
Temperature, pressure and phase
change
● Heat or cool a stream of solid particles by direct contact
with a hot gas or cold gas, respectively, using rotary kiln,
a fluidized bed, a multiple hearth, a flash/pneumatic
conveyor or a jacketed spiral conveyor.

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