The aim of this book is to bring a little light into the darkness.
Most often, his undergraduate training did not cover the modern algorithms used in these systems, the User's Manual contains only vague or unobtainable references to the exact computational techniques employed, and the Systems Manual may be proprietary, so the design exercise degenerates into what is often a "black-box" operation, the user being left in the dark. The availability of commercial process simulation computing systems such as CONCEPT, DESIGN/2000, FLOWTRAN, GPS-11, and PROCESS has, in many instances, reduced the engineer to the status of an army private. One of the premises of this book is that what was once good for the army is not necessarily good for the engineering profession. Commercially available computer programs for stagewise computations are now so robust and reliable that one can say of them, as was once said of the army, that they were organized by geniuses to be run by idiots. Today, accurate thermodynamics packages coupled with sufficiently rigorous computational algorithms enable engineers to solve rapidly on time-shared computer terminals, without leaving their desks, what were once considered perversely difficult problems.
Ten years ago, design of fractionators, absorbers, strippers, and extractors was often done by approximate calculation procedures and reboiled absorbers and extractive distillation columns were often "guesstimated" from experience and pilot plant data. No other area of chemical engineering has changed so dramatically in the past decade as that of design procedures for separation operations based on the equilibrium-stage concept.
There has been such a bewildering flow of information, dealing especially with the principles of stage calculations, that the engineer who is not a distillation expert finds himself at a loss as to how to select the best procedures for solving his distillation problems. The literature abounds with information on all phases of distillation calculations and design. Printed and bound by Q u i i - Woorib'ine. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Henley, Ernest J Equilibrium-stage separation operations in chemical engineering. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons. Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Column shown was designed by one of the authors.ĭIPARTIMENTQ Dl INGEGNERIA CHlMK DEl PROCESS1 E DEI MATERIAL1Ĭopyright 1981, by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Macco Refinery and Chemical Division, California, was the prime contractor for construction.
The lift was one of the heaviest ever accomplished in the U.S.with a load of this type.
Seader Professor of Chemical Engineering University of UtahĪ 350-ton deisobutanizer distillation column, 212 feet high, was raised into position in one piece at the El Segundo refinery of Standard Oil Co. Henley Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Houston Equilibrium-Stage Separation Operations in Chemical Engineering Ernest J.