Up She Goes! Equilibrium-Stage Separation Operations in Chemical Engineering Ernest J. Henley Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Houston and J. D. Seader Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Utal | ‘IPARTIMENTO DI INGEGNERIA HIM .3804ondeisoktanie tite, 22 fe gh, wa ed into Oe ROCESS De MATENAL poston mons pec nthe EI Segundo seiner? of Sano Oi Ce of Salas California, Western Operations, Inc. The lift was one of the heaviest ever N Ei ‘Buono N. sont. wait rte Ha ey st Cea JOHN WILEY & SONS\ey “45 gag Ee Refer. 37, Na. 2, V8 (I95B)}, Colum akon wes designed by ene of the New York + Chichester - Brisbs authors.Copyright © 1981, by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. At rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada Reproduction or ansition of way part of this work beyond that permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the 1975 Unites States Copyright ‘Act without the permission ofthe copyright, ‘owner is unlawul. Requests for permission ‘or farther information should be adesse8 0 the Permissions Department, Jon Wiley & Sons. Library of Congress Cataloging in Pubcon Data Henley, Brest 3 Equiibrum-sageseparition operations in chemical engineering. Includes index. 1. Separation (Technology) 2. Chemical ‘equiiviom. 1. Seader, J.D. jot author Tae TpIs6SesHss — Go028 80-1393 ISBN O4T1-37108-4 Printed in the United States of America 39 29 25 27-26 25 24 23:22 Printed nad boon by Quinn - Wooing, Ine The literature abounds with information on all Phases, of distillation calculations and design. here has been such a bewildering flow of in- formation, dealing especiatly with the principles of stage calculations, that the engineer who is not a distitiation expert finds himself at a loss as to how to select the best procedures for solving his dis- tilation problems. James R. Fair and William L. Bolles, 1968PREFACE ical engineering has changed so dramatically in the past decade as that of design pracedures for separation aperations based an the ‘equilibriura-stage concept. Ten years ago, design of fractionators, absorbers, Strippers, and extractors was often dove by approximate calculation procedures: and reboiled absorbers and extractive distillation columns were often “guess- timated” from experience and pilot plant data. Today, accurate ther~ modynamics packages coupled with sufficiently rigorous computational al- gorithms enable engineers 10 solve rapidly on time-shared computer terminals, without leaving their desks, what were once considered perversely difficult problems. Commercially available computer programs for stagewise com- putations ate now so robust and reliable that one can say of them, as was once said of the army, that they were organized by geniuses fo be run by idiots. (One of the premises of this book is that what was once good for the army is not necessarily good for the engineering profession. The availability of commercial process simulation computing systems such as CONCEPT, DESIGN/2000, FLOWTRAN, GPS-II, and PROCESS has, in many instances, seduced the engineer to the status of an army private. Most often, his under- graduate training did not cover the modern algorithms used in these systems, the User's Manual contains only vague of unobtainable references to the exact computational techniques employed, and the Systems Manual may be pro- prictary, so the design exercise degenerates into what is often a “black-bo} operation, the user being left in the dark. The aim of this book is to bring a little light into the darkness. We made a careful study of all major publicly available computing systems, ran a fairly large number of industrially significant problems, and then used these problems as vehicles to bring the reader to an in-depth understanding of modern calculation procedures. This approach enabled us to trim the book by eliminating those techniques that are not widely used in practice or have litle instructional value.