COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)

Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS

OBJECTIVES
The process design consists of designing of a process such as distillation, absorption, adsorption etc.

In short to design all chemical processes (where chemical reactions can be carried out) and products design
this concept can be use.

Special emphasis is placed on the growing importance of protecting the environment and ensuring safe
and reliable chemical products, as well as manufacturing facilities, considerations that are prominent in the
minds of product and process design team.

 Be knowledgeable about the organizational structures involved in product and process design, and
their interactions, at chemical companies.
 Have an appreciation of the key steps in carrying out a product and/or process design and
technology-development framework.
 Be aware of the many kinds of environmental issues and safety considerations prevalent in the
design of new chemical products and processes.
 Appreciate the importance of maintaining high ethical principles in product and process design.

DESIGN OPPORTUNITIES (CLASSES OF CHEMICAL PRODUCTS)

 Chemical products can be roughly classified as:
(1) Basic chemical products,
(2) Industrial products, and
(3) Configured consumer products.

Figure 1.3 Manufacture of chemical products

 As shown in Figure 1.3a, basic chemical products are manufactured from natural resources. They
include commodity and specialty chemicals (e.g., commodity chemicals—ethylene, acetone, vinyl
chloride; and specialty chemicals—difluoroethylene, ethylene glycol monomethyl ether, diethyl
Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 1
 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
ketone), biomaterials (e.g., pharmaceuticals, tissue implants), and polymeric materials (e.g.,
ethylene copolymers, polyvinyl chloride [PVC], polystyrene). They normally involve well-defined
molecules and mixtures of molecules, and are normally not sold directly to the consumer.
 The manufacture of industrial chemical products begins with the basic chemical products, as shown
in Figure 1.3b. Industrial chemical products include films, fibers (woven and nonwoven), paper,
creams, and pastes. While they are characterized by thermophysical and transport properties (like
basic chemicals), other properties are normally dominant in satisfying customer needs, including
microstructure, particle-size distribution, and functional, sensorial, rheological, and physical
properties. See the introduction to Part Two for more specifics. Like basic chemicals, few industrial
chemicals are purchased by the consumer.

 Finally, as shown in Figure 1.3c, configured consumer chemical products are manufactured from
basic chemical and industrial chemical products. These include dialysis devices, hand warmers,
Post-it notes, ink-jet cartridges, detachable wall hangers, solar desalination devices, transparencies
for overhead projectors, drug-delivery patches, fuel cells, cosmetics, detergents, pharmaceuticals,
etc. Unlike basic and industrial chemical products, configured consumer chemical products are
normally sold to the consumer. In most cases, they are characterized by properties similar to those
of industrial chemicals and, in some cases, their three dimensional configurations are crucial in
satisfying consumer needs.
 Many chemical products, especially specialty products, are manufactured in small quantities, and
the design of a product focuses on identifying the chemicals or mixture of chemicals that have the
desired properties, such as strength, stickiness, porosity, permeability, and therapeutic
effectiveness, to satisfy specific consumer needs. After the chemical mixture is identified, it is often
necessary to design a manufacturing process, often involving small-batch operations.
 Other chemical products, often referred to as commodity chemicals, are required in large
quantities. These are often intermediates in the manufacture of specialty chemicals and industrial
and configured consumer products. These include ethylene, propylene, butadiene, methanol,
ethanol, ethylene oxide, ethylene glycol, ammonia, nylon, and caprolactam (for carpets); together
with solvents like benzene, toluene, phenol, methyl chloride, and tetrahydrofuran; and fuels like
gasoline, kerosene, and diesel. These are manufactured in large-scale processes that produce
billions of pounds annually in continuous operation.
 Often chemicals originate in the research labs of chemists, biochemists, and engineers who seek to
satisfy the desires of customers for chemicals with improved properties for many applications (e.g.,
textiles, carpets, plastic tubing).

STEPS IN PRODUCT PROCESS DESIGN

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 2

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 3

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 4

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
At the risk of excluding many key environmental issues, the following are singled out as being
closely related to the design of chemical products and processes.

 Burning of Fossil Fuels for Power Generation and Transportation

 Because fossil fuels are the predominant sources of power worldwide, their combustion products
are a primary source of several pollutants, especially in the urban centers of industrialized nations.
 More specifically, effluent gases from burners and fires contain sizable concentrations of SO2, the
nitrogen oxides (NOx), CO, CO2, soot, ash, and unburned hydrocarbons.
 These, in turn, result in many environmental problems, including acid rain (principally concentrated
in H2SO4), smog and hazes (concentrated in NOx), the cumulation of the so-called greenhouse gas
(CO2), volatile toxic compounds (e.g., formaldehyde, phenol), and organic gases (e.g., CO), which
react with NOx, especially on hot summer days, altering the O3 level.
 As the adverse impacts of pollutants on animals, plant life, and humans are being discovered by
scientists and engineers, methods are sought to reduce their levels significantly.
 In some cases, this is accomplished by one of several methods, such as separating the sources (e.g.,
sulfur compounds) from fuels; adjusting the combustion process (e.g., by reducing the temperature
and residence time of the flame to produce less NOx); separating soot, ash, and noxious
compounds from effluent gases; reacting the effluent gases in catalytic converters; or through the
use of algae to consume (through photosynthesis) large quantities of CO2 in flue gases (a recently
proposed technique now under study).
 As a rule of thumb, it should be noted that the cost of cleaning combustion products is
approximately an order of magnitude less than the cost of removing contaminants from fuel. This is
an important heuristic, especially when designing processes that are energy intensive, requiring
large quantities of fuel.

 Sustainability and Life-Cycle Design

 By selecting sustainable raw materials and producing sustainable products, designers attempt to
meet the needs of society today while respecting the anticipated needs of future generations.
 Such choices are also intended to avoid harming the environment and limiting the choices of future
generations. In some cases, this translates to the use of so-called green raw materials and the
production of so-called green products.
 These often help to resolve health problems, provide environmental protection, preserve natural
resources, and prevent climate change.
 As mentioned above, the growing emphasis on sustainability is closely related to the increasing
recognition of global warming due to the greenhouse effect as well as political problems associated
with the traditional suppliers of oil and natural gas.
 Historically, most chemical products have been derived from methane, ethane, propane, and
aromatics, normally obtained from oil and natural gas. Furthermore, a large percentage of energy
for manufacturing (on the order of 80 percent) and wastes produced in manufacturing (also on the
order of 80 percent) are associated with the chemical industries, including petroleum refining,
chemicals production, forest products, steel, aluminum, glass, and cement. To achieve sustainability
while producing high-quality products, it is desirable to use small amounts of raw materials and
energy, and to produce small amounts of waste.

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 5

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 When planning for sustainability in the 21st century, the rapid growth of the large developing
nations, especially China and India, is important.
 Decisions to take advantage of today’s cheap prices and easy accessibility may result in expensive
or inaccessible raw materials for future generations. With the price of oil having quadrupled in just
three years, there has been a move toward the usage of renewable ‘‘green’’ resources.
 However, such carbon sources, when burned as fuel or incinerated as waste, produce carbon
dioxide, and consequently, it has become increasingly important to find practical ways to sequester
carbon dioxide rather than release it into the atmosphere. For these reasons, alternate energy
sources, such as hydrogen, nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal, are gaining increased attention.
 In these cases, the raw materials are renewable and there are no waste-disposal issues.

 Handling of Toxic Wastes

 In the chemical and nuclear power industries, large quantities of toxic wastes are produced
annually, largely in wastewater streams, which in 1988 amounted to 97% of the wastes produced.
 While a mall portion is incinerated (on the order of 3% in the late 1980s), the bulk is disposed of in
or on the land, with a variety of methods having been introduced over the past century to bury
these wastes. Since the late 1960s, many of the burial sites (e.g., Love Canal, Times Beach) have
threatened the health of nearby residents and, more broadly, have threatened to contaminate the
underground water supply throughout entire states and countries.
 In this regard, studies by the state of California have shown that aqueous waste streams from the
processing of electronic materials are posing widespread threats to the groundwater in California's
Silicon Valley. In fact, this area has a leading number of sites on the U.S. National Priority List of
toxic waste dumps (which is comprised of approximately 10,000 sites throughout the United
States). ). In process design, it is essential that facilities be included to remove pollutants from
wastewater streams.

 Bio-accumulated Chemicals
 Probably the most well-known cases of chemicals that have been discovered to bioaccumulate in
the soil and plant life are the insecticide DDT (1,1-bis(4-chlorophenyl)-2,2,2-trichloroethane;
C14H9Cl5) and the solvent PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
 DDT was sprayed in large quantitiesby low-flying airplanes to kill insects and pests throughout the
1950s. Unfortunately, although effective for protecting crops, forests, and plant life, toxic effects in
birds, animals, and humans were strongly suspected, DDT was banned by the U.S. EPA in 1972.
 Its effect, however, will remain for some time due to its having bioaccumulated in the soil and plant
life.

 Toxic Metals and Minerals

 It was discovered that lead, mercury, cadmium, and asbestos has the toxic effects on animals and
humans.
 After lead poisoning (accompanied by brain damage, disfigurement, and paralysis) was related to
the ingestion of lead-based paints by children (especially in older buildings that are not well
maintained), the EPA banned lead from paints as well as from fuels. In fuel, tetraelhyl lead had
been used as an octane enhancer throughout the world.
 It was subsequently replaced bymethyl tertiary-butyl ether(MTBE), which is also being replaced due
to reports that it can contaminate ground water.

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 6

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 Mercury, which has been the mainstay of manometers in chemistry laboratories, has similarly been
found to be extremely toxic, with disastrous effects of accidental exposure and ingestion reported
periodically.
 Asbestos’s toxic effects remain a concern in all buildings. Gradually, as these buildings are being
renovated, sheets of asbestos insulation and asbestos ceiling tiles are being removed and replaced
by nontoxic materials. Here, also, the incidents of asbestos poisoning are associated most often
with older buildings that have not been well maintained.

ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS IN PRODUCT AND PROCESS DESIGN

The need to retrofit existing plants and to design new, environmentally sound plants has required chemical
engineers to become far more proficient in accounting for environmentally related factors.

 Reaction Pathways to Reduce Byproduct Toxicity

 The selection of reaction pathways to reduce byproduct toxicity is a key consideration during
preliminary process synthesis, when the reaction operations are positioned.
 As the reaction operations are determined by chemists and biochemists in the laboratory, the
toxicity of all of the chemicals, especially chemicals recovered as byproducts, needs to be
evaluated.
 For this purpose, companies have toxicity laboratories and, in many cases, large repositories of
toxicity data.
 Clearly, when large quantities of toxic chemicals are anticipated, other reaction pathways must be
sought; when these cannot be found, design concepts are rejected, except under unusual
circumstances.

 Reducing and Reusing Wastes

 Environmental concerns have caused chemical engineers to place even greater emphasis on
recycling, not only unreacted chemicals but also product and byproducts
 In so doing, design teams commonly anticipate the life cycles of their products and byproducts,
paying special attention to the waste markets, so as to select the appropriate waste quality.
 Stated differently, the team views the proposed plant as a producer of engineering scrap and
attempts to ensure that there will be a market for the chemicals produced after their useful life is
over.
 Clearly, this is a principal consideration in the production of composite materials and polymers. In
this connection, it is important to plan on producing segregated wastes when they are desired by
the waste market, and in so doing, to avoid overmixing the waste streams.

 Avoiding Nonroutine Events

 To reduce the possibilities for accidents and spills, with their adverse environmental consequences,
processes are often designed to reduce the number of transient operations, cleanup periods, and
catalyst regeneration cycles.
 In other words, emphasis is on the design of a process that is easily controlled at or near a nominal
steady state, with reliable controllers and effective fault-detection sensors.

 Materials Characterization
 Waste chemicals are present in small amounts in gaseous or liquid effluents. To maintain low
concentrations of such chemicals below the limits of environmental regulations, it is important to

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 7

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
use effective and rapid methods for measuring or deducing their concentrations from other
measurements.
 In this regard, the design team needs to understand the effect of concentration on toxicity, which
can vary significantly in the dilute concentration range.
 Another consideration is to design the plant to use recycled chemicals—that is, someone else’s
waste. When this is accomplished, it is necessary to know the range of compositions within which
the waste chemicals are available.

 Design Objectives, Constraints, and Optimization

 Environmental objectives are normally not well defined because economic objective functions
normally involve profitability measures, whereas the value of reduced pollution is not easily
quantified by economic measures.
 As a consequence, design teams often formulate mixed objective functions that attempt to express
environmental improvements in financial terms.
 In other cases, the team may settle for the optimization of an economic objective function, subject
to bounds on the concentrations of the solutes in the waste streams.
 It is important to assess whether the constraints are hard (not allowed to be violated) or soft
(capable of being violated under unusual circumstances).
 Emphasis must be placed on the formulation of each constraint and the extent to which it must be
honored.

 Regulations
 As mentioned previously, some environmental regulations can be treated as constraints to be
satisfied during operation of the process being designed.
 When a mathematical model of the proposed process is created, the design team can check that
these constraints are satisfied for the operating conditions being considered.
 When an objective function is formulated, the design variables can be adjusted to obtain the
maximum or minimum while satisfying the constraints.
 Other regulations are more difficult to quantify. These involve the expectations of the public and
the possible backlash should the plant be perceived as a source of pollution. In a similar vein,
constraints may be placed on the plant location, principally because the local government may
impose zoning regulations that require chemical plants to be located in commercial areas, beyond a
certain distance from residential neighborhoods.
 To keep these regulations from becoming too prohibitive, chemical companies have a great
incentive to gain public confidence by satisfying environmental regulations and maintaining
excellent safety records.

 Intangible Costs
 Like the regulations imposed by local governments, some of the economic effects of design
decisions related to the environment are very difficult to quantify.
 These include the cost of liability when a plant is found to be delinquent in satisfying regulations,
and in this connection, the cost of legal fees, public relations losses, and delays incurred when
environmental groups stage protests.
 Normally, because these costs cannot be estimated reliably by a design team, mixed objectives are
not formulated and no attempts are made to account for them in an optimization study.
 Rather, the design team concentrates on ensuring that the regulations will be satisfied, thereby
avoiding legal fees, public relations losses, and the complications associated with public
demonstrations.

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 8

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 Properties of Dilute Streams
 Most pollutants in the effluent and purge streams from chemical plants are present in dilute
concentrations.
 The regulations often require that their concentrations be kept below parts per million or parts per
billion, reliable and fast analysis methods are needed to ensure that the regulations are satisfied.
 Beyond that, it is often important to understand the impact of the concentration on the kinetics of
these species in the environment—for example, the rates of chemical reaction of organic species,
such as CO, with NOx in the atmosphere to produce O3, and the rate at which other reaction
byproducts are formed.
 With this knowledge, a company can help regulatory agencies arrive at concentration limits more
scientifically and, in some cases, at limits that are less restrictive, and cost companies, and the
consumers of their products, less in the long run.
 In urban smog, high concentrations of ozone often create problems for people with respiratory
ailments.

 Properties of Electrolytes
 Many aqueous streams contain inorganic compounds that dissociate into ionic species, including
acids, bases, and salts, often in dilute concentrations.
 These electrolytic solutions commonly occur in the manufacture of inorganic chemicals (e.g., soda
ash, Na2CO3), in the strong solvents used in the pulp and paper industry, in the aqueous wastes
associated with the manufacture of electronic materials (e.g., silicon wafers, integrated circuits,
photovoltaic films), and in many other industries.
 Strong electrolytes dissociate into ionic species whose interactions with water and organic
molecules are crucial to understanding the state of a mixture—that is, the phases present (vapor,
water, organic liquid, solid precipitates, etc.) at a given temperature and pressure.
 Hence, when designing processes that involve electrolytes, a design team needs to include the
properties of ionic species in its thermophysical properties database.
 Fortunately, to provide assistance for designers, databases and facilities for estimating the
thermophysical properties of a broad base of ionic species over an increasing range of
temperatures and pressures are available in process simulators.

SAFETY CONSIDERATIONS
SAFETY ISSUES
Of the many potential safety issues, two are singled out for coverage here because they must be
confronted often in the design of chemical, petroleum, and petrochemical plants and in other plants in
which exothermic reactions and operations occur at elevated pressures.

 Fires and Explosions

 In organic chemical processes, it is not uncommon for sizable concentrations of flammable
chemicals to accumulate in air or pure oxygen with the possibilities of ignition or even explosion.
 For this reason, laboratory studies have been carried out to determine the flammability limits for
many of the common organic chemical vapors.
 LFL: Volume % of constituents below which flammability does not take place is known as Lower
flammability limit.
 UFL: Volume % of constituents above which flammability does not take place is known as upper
flammability limit.

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 9

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 Flash point: It is minimum temperature at which combustible liquid starts to burn without
continuous burning. (The flash point is the lowest temperature at which sufficient vapor exists in
air to form an ignitable mixture.)
 Fire point: It is minimum temperature at which combustible liquid starts to burn with continuous
burning.
 Within these UFL & LFL limits, flames and explosions can occur and, consequently, design teams
must be careful to keep the concentrations outside the flammability range. At lower temperatures,
an ignition source must be present.
 For mixtures, the flammability limits are often estimated using the Le Chatelier equation, an
empirical equation that must be used with caution:

 Where, LFLi and UFLi are the flammability limits of species i, yi is the mole fraction of species i in the
vapor, and C is the number of chemical species in the mixture, excluding air.
 To extend the flammability limits to elevated temperatures and pressures, the following equations
have been developed:

 Where, T is the temperature (in ˚C), ΔHc is the net heat of combustion (in kcal/mol at 258C), P is the
pressure (in MPa absolute), and UFL is the upper flammability limit at 101.3 kPa (1 atm). The lower
flammability limit is not observed to vary significantly with the pressure.
 With this kind of information, the process designer makes sure that flammable mixtures do not
exist in the process during startup, steady-state operation, or shutdown.

 Toxic Releases and Dispersion Models

 In chemical processing, it is desirable to avoid working with chemicals that are toxic to animals,
humans, and plant life.
 This is an important consideration as design teams select from among the possible raw materials
and consider alternate reaction paths, involving intermediate chemicals and byproducts.
 In some cases, decisions can be made to work with nontoxic chemicals. However, toxicity problems
are difficult to avoid, especially at the high concentrations of chemicals in many process streams
and vessels.
 The potential for a release in toxic concentrations during an accident must be considered carefully
by design teams.

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 10

 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 In so doing, a team must identify the ways in which releases can occur; for example, due to the
buildup of pressure in an explosion, the rupture of a pipeline due to surges at high pressure, or the
collision of a tank car on a truck or train.
 It is also important for the team to select protective devices and processing units, to assess their
potential for failure, and, in the worse case, to model the spread of a dense, toxic vapor. Given the
potential for the rapid spreading of a toxic cloud, it is often necessary to find an alternative design

ENGINEERING ETHICS
 In 1977, a statement was approved by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology
(ABET), as follows:
 Engineers uphold and advance the integrity, honor, and dignity of the engineering profession by:
I. Using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare;
II. Being honest and impartial, and serving with fidelity the publics, their employees;
III. Striving to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering profession; and
Supporting the professional and technical societies of their disciplines.
 Engineering ethics is concerned with the personal conduct of engineers as they uphold and advance
the integrity, honor, and dignity of engineering while practicing their profession. This conduct of
behavior has obligations to
(1) self,
(2) employer and/or client,
(3) colleagues and co-workers,
(4) public, and
(5) environment.
 Ethics deals with standards of conduct or morals.
The following is the Code of Ethics adopted by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers
(AIChE):
1. Hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in performance of their
professional duties
2. Formally advise their employers or clients if they perceive that a consequence of their duties
will adversely affect the present or future health or safety of their colleagues or the public
3. Accept responsibility for their actions and recognize the contributions of work of others. Seek
critical review of their work and offer objective criticism of the work of others.
4. Issue statements and present information only in an objective and truthful manner.
5. Act in professional matters for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees and avoid
conflict of interest.
6. Treat fairly all colleagues and co-workers, recognizing their unique trustees, and avoid conflicts
of interest.
7. Perform professional services only in areas of their competence.
8. Build their professional reputations on the merits of their services,
9. Continue their professional development throughout their careers, and provide opportunities
for the professional development of those under their supervision.

ROLE OF COMPUTERS
ROLES OF COMPUTERS IN PRODUCT AND PROCESS DESIGN
 They can help to lower production costs, as they eliminate much of the human labour that must be
paid in a traditional factory.
Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 11
 COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS SYNTHESIS (3170507), Sem- VII (CHEM)
Chapter Name: THE DESIGN PROCESS
 They also have increased productivity, because the entire system is automated and runs smoothly,
with less risk of error

THE FOLLOWING SOFTWARES ARE USEFUL FOR CHEMICAL ENGINEERS

 MATLAB
 ASPEN HYSYS
 ASPEN PLUS
 CHEMCAD
 COMSOL
 PROMAX
 PROSIM
 MAPLE

Prepared By: Ms. Riya B Patel Page 12