Simulating the Cooling of a Plug-Flow Reactor with Boiling Water in HYSYS (Similarly for heating with condensing steam)

The following procedure is recommended for the simulation of cooling a plug-flow reactor using HYSYS. If it doesn't work please let me know.

HYSYS does not permit the direct simulation of cooling by boiling. Only a non-boiling coolant is permitted, so one must simulate boiling at constant temperature by using such an arbitrarily high heat capacity and flow rate for a fictional liquid that its temperature changes very little in flowing through the reactor. The reactor duty is then divided by the latent heat of vaporization to get the actual flow rate of coolant, which is saturated boiler feed water when cooling by boiling water. In this procedure, the heat exchange area and the tube area are automatically the same, with accuracy being limited only by our choice of heat transfer coefficients.

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Enter all known conditions for the reaction kinetics, including the Catalyst Data on the Reactions Overall page and the tube diameter & wall thickness and void fraction on the Ratings page.

2. With the calculator turned off, guess values for Tube Volume and Length (do not specify the number of tubes) on the Ratings page, T & P for the process stream inlet & outlet. Turn the calculator on. If necessary, adjust these parameters to get a reasonable conversion. 3. Unspecify the exit pressure (or pressure drop). On the Design Parameters page click on the Ergun Equation button. If the pressure drop is too high, increase the reactor volume and/or decrease the tube length. 4. Turn off the calculator. Select a water-steam temperature corresponding to one of the standard steam pressure values, ~150oC, ~190 oC or ~253 oC . Enter this as the Inlet Temp on the Design Heat Transfer page. (The "Heat Medium" is actually the cooling medium, i.e. boiling water, and is on the shell side.) For Wall Heat Tran enter a reasonable value for boiling heat transfer (e.g., 200 Btu/h.ft2.oF from heuristics). For tubes packed with solid catalyst particles, use an appropriate value such as ~200 kJ/h-m2-oC.1[1] For tubes containing only a fluid, use the default values for the Standard Tube Side Heat Transfer

(A=1.6, B=0.51, C=1/3). (Alternately, you can use an equation shown in Table 17.18 in Walas.) 5. Turn on the calculator. When the calculations have converged, check the temperature profiles on the Performance Conditions Plot. If the coolant temperature varies significantly, increase the coolant flow and heat capacity until it is constant. If you find that this lowers the process temperature in the reactor too much, increase the initial coolant temperature to a higher standard steam pressure, even if this is higher than the process feed temperature. When you are satisfied with the result, record the duty. This is the heat removed in formation of steam. Calculate the amount of steam produced by dividing the duty by the latent heat of evaporation of saturated water at this temperature.

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W.R. Wilcox, Clarkson University, 1 November 2004 Updated December 12, 2007