QUESTION 1

CHBE403

GUSTAVO TRENTINI HAMESTER

To start this problem one must specify the components and which method will be used to
estimate the vapor-liquid equilibrium. In this case, since the system is subcritical and theres
experimental data available the NRTL is used to calculate the activity coeffcients that is used to
estimate the relative volatility. After, its necessary to do a first estimation of the minimum reflux
ratio, number of stages and feed stage location. For this part the DSTWU routine is used.
Especifying the n-hexane recovery at the distillate stream as 0.9918 and the p-xylene recovery
as 0.0122, and setting a guess for the number of stages one may run the simulation and get the
results shown in the table below. The estimatite of theoretical stages is round to the closest
integer value, 12, just as the feed stage location, 7. Comparing with the graphical solution one

may assert that the results are very close.

Figure 1. Graphic method to find an approximation for the optimum reflux ratio and number of
stages. The table to construct this graph may be found at the Excel spreadsheet.

Since the RADFRAC routine requires a good estimation for the initial variables, the value
estimated using DSTWU are used here. For this run 12 stages were used and feed location was at
the stage 7. Another run feeding the column at stage 6 was tested, but the heat duty was bigger
than feeding at stage 7. Even though the DSTWU estimation for reflux ratio is close to the
optimum value, one needs to test several values for the reflux ratio to make sure which reflux
ratio is best. On RADFRAC it can be done by setting a design specification and setting a variable
to be adjusted. For this run the lower bound for the reflux ratio was 0.30518(minimum reflux
ratio) and the upper bound was 5. On the Operating specifications tab under the setup tab the
reflux ratio was set to 0.32.