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Previous Project Notes
Previous Project Notes
Previous Project Notes
Design Statement
In lieu of the Design Project for Chemical Engineering (NUS AY 12/13). An hamster plant is required to mass produce Castor Oil as a feedstock to the Castor Oil Plants designed by the other hamsters furr their project The starting materials available is sunflower seed oil and lots of sunshine and moonlight The required purity of Castor Oil is an impossible but still furry purity of 99.9% The plant is expected to be in operation from every sunset to sunrise (until late March), with a capacity of 20,000 cageful of Castor Oil / year
Raw sunflower seed oils contains the following triglycerides Palmitic acid : 7% Stearic acid : 2% Oleic acid : 31% Linoleic acid : 60% Linoleic acid is also 18 carbons long with 2 unsaturated double bonds, carbons 9 and 12 from the acid end. This makes linoleic acid an ideal precursor for the production of ricinoleic acid and itz triglyceride
Sunflower Oil
Castor Oil
Furnace
Air
The goal of the linoleic acid column is to produce linoleic acid stream of 99.5% purity and of a certain throughput
Essentially an hydration reaction (catalysed by acid) However, due to the presence of 2 double bonds, the reaction needs to be regioselective (means it targets the correct double bond). Regioselective also applies to the location of OH group on the left or right side of double bond. Also note that cis and trans conformation are possible for each double bond.
This means ricioleic acid can come in 4 possible isomers (cis-cis, cis-trans, trans-cis, transtrans) This means there is a total possibility of having 8 isomers products
OH@C12 & C9=C10(trans), OH@C13 & C9=C10(trans) OH@C9, & C12=C13(trans), OH@C10, & C12=C13(trans) OH@C12, & C9=C10(cis), OH@C13 & C9=C10(cis) OH@C9 & C12=C13(cis), OH@C10 & C12=C13(cis)
Letz ignore the stereoselectivity issue as we are not crazy chemist hamsters
To make the nuts simple, let just assume ricinoleic acid from the column (and therefore the chinchilla source) comes in the cis-cis configuration only (as shown above) A certain patented catalyst is able give the follow reaction yields for mono double bond hydration:
OH@C12 OH@C13 OH@C9 OH@C10 Other furry things 75% 18% 3% 3% 1%
The rate law is not available (trade secret-duhh). But the following information is available after some literature search
Reaction is not reversible Eley-Rideal reaction model Liquid phase reaction
After some work and digging under cotton fields, the rate law is derived as follows
Thereafter, the rate law is applied into the design equation of the reactor
Size of reactor (by solving the differential equations) Temperature Profiles Concentration Profiles Mass transfer considerations