Lecture 3

General Design Considerations: Part 3

 Contents
✓ Design factors
✓ The Design approach i.e., General problem-solving
approaches; "Rule of Thumb" approach
✓ Source of data
✓ Process data, and
✓ Level of accuracy required for engineering data
 Design factors (design margins)
▪ Design factors are boundaries that are included in the design processes to
reduce errors and uncertainties so as to increase the safety and performance of
the design.
▪ Design is an inaccurate art since errors and uncertainties arise from uncertainties
available in the design data and in the estimates required for design calculations.
▪ Experienced designers include a degree of over-design known as a ‘‘design
factor,’’ ‘‘design margin,’’ or ‘‘safety factor,’’ to ensure that the built design
meets product specifications and operates safely.
▪ “Design factor” is better to use, as it does not confuse safety and performance
factors.
▪ Design factors are also applied in process design to give some acceptance
in the design.
▪ Where design factors are introduced to give some possibility in a process
design, they should be agreed on the project organization and should be
clearly stated in the project documents (i.e., drawings, calculation sheets,
and manuals).
▪ When selecting the design factor, a balance has to be made between the
desire to make sure the design is satisfactory and the need to design to fit
boundaries to stay as competitive.
▪ Greater uncertainty in the design methods and data requires the use of
bigger design factors.
 The design approach
▪ The general approach in any plant design involves a carefully balanced
combination of theory, practice, originality/novelty, and basic common sense.
▪ In original design work, the engineer must deal with many different types of
experimental and empirical data.
▪ In design, the engineer may be able to obtain and take accurate values of physical
properties: heat capacity, density, vapor-liquid equilibrium data, or other
information from the literature.
▪ In the engineer’s approach to solving any design problem, it is necessary to be
prepared to make many assumptions, and to consider other important factor such
as economic conditions and limitations.
▪ The engineer must consider costs and probable profits constantly during the
design work.
▪ It is almost always better to sell many units of a product at a low profit per
unit than a few units at a high profit per unit. Consequently, the engineer
must take into account the volume of production when determining costs and
total profits for various types of designs. This obviously leads to considerations
of customer needs and demands.

General problem-solving approaches; "Rule of Thumb" approach

▪ Rules of thumb are essential for problem-solving in an industry i.e., for safe
design, process improvement, and for troubleshooting purposes.
▪ Rules of Thumb are numerical values and suggestions that are reasonable to
assume based on experience/ knowledge (i.e., based on the application of
fundamental and practical experiences). They do not replace fundamentals but
rather they enrich the correct use of fundamentals to solve problems.
▪ Rules of thumb are important for process design and engineering practice
such as for:
➢ The design of chemical process equipment,
➢ The context in which the equipment functions/operates (i.e., properties of
materials, corrosion, process control, process type i.e., batch versus
continuous and economics), and
➢ The thinking process used for engineers design and to practice their skills
(problem solving, goal setting, decision making, systems thinking, process
design, process improvement, trouble shooting and health-safety-environment
issues).
❑ Rules of thumb are based on different types of experience. These different
types of experience include (together with their code):
▪ generalized physical, thermal, environmental and safety
▪ properties of solids, liquids or gases (P),
▪ generalized fundamental concepts/theories (F),
▪ generalized operating conditions: transfer coefficients, efficiencies
(O),
▪ generalized manufacturers limitations (M),
▪ generalized natural or legal constraints: wind load, size of equipment
shipped through rail tunnels (N)
▪ economic optimization: approach temperature, minimum reflux ratio
($),
▪ generalized engineering judgment: max temperature for cooling
water, operating location for pumps (J)
▪ hazard or safety consideration (H).
 Sources of data
▪ Information about manufacturing processes, equipment parameters, materials
used for construction, costs, and physical properties of process materials are
required in all stages of design, from the initial screening/selecting of the
possible processes to the plant startup and production stage.
▪ For a new project or process, the design data must be obtained from the
literature, or through experiments (research laboratory and pilot plant), or
purchased from other companies.
▪ The literature on the physical properties of elements and compounds is
widespread, and reliable values of common materials are usually found.
▪ If values cannot be found, the required data must be measured experimentally
or estimated.
❖ General information data and specific data required for the development of a
design project can be obtained from different sources such as:
A. Textbooks
▪ A large number of textbooks covering the various aspects of chemical engineering
principles and design are available. In addition, many handbooks have been
published giving physical properties and other basic data which are very necessary
to the design engineer.
▪ A primary source of information on all aspects of chemical engineering principles,
design, costs, and applications is “Perry and Green: Perry’s Chemical Engineers’
Handbook” published by McGraw-Hill Book Company.
B. Technical journals
▪ Regular features on design-related aspects of equipment, costs, materials of
construction, and unit processes are published in Chemical Engineering Journals.
▪ In addition, there are many other periodicals (i.e., reviews, reports, journals, etc.)
that are basic for the design engineer. The following periodicals are suggested as
valuable sources of information for the chemical engineer who wishes to keep up
with the recent developments in the field:
✓ American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal (AICHE)
✓ Chemical Engineering Progress
✓ Chemical and Engineering News
✓ Chemical Engineering Science
✓ Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Fundamentals
✓ Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Process Design and
Development
✓ Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Journal of Physical
Chemistry
✓ Hydrocarbon Processing
✓ Oil and Gas Journal
✓ Engineering News-Record
✓ Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering
C. Trade bulletins/announcements (e.g., magazine)
▪ Trade bulletins are published regularly by most manufacturing concerns, and these
bulletins give much information of direct interest to the chemical engineer preparing
a design.
▪ Some of the trade bulletin information is summarized in an excellent reference book
on chemical engineering equipment, products, and manufacturers. This book is
known as the “Chemical Engineering Catalog’’ and contains a large amount of
valuable descriptive material.
▪ Many of the publications are dedicated to estimating physical properties or for
making design calculations, while others collect essential data in the form of
nomographs or tables.
 Process data
▪ Chemical process industries are competitive, and the information that is published
on commercial processes is limited.
▪ The articles on particular processes published in the technical literature and in
textbooks usually give information about the chemistry and unit operations used.
Thus, they lack the detailed information on reaction kinetics, process conditions,
equipment parameters, and physical properties required for the process design.
➢ The most complete collection of information on manufacturing processes is
possibly the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology edited by Kirk (2003) and
Kirk and Othmer (2001), which covers the whole range of chemical and
associated products, and also Encyclopedia edited by McKetta (2001).
▪ More latest descriptions of the processes in current use can be found in
the technical journals.
▪ For e.g., a review of petrochemical processes titled Petrochemical
Developments and is now called Petrochemicals Notebook published in
the journal of Hydrocarbon Processing publishes gives flow diagrams
and brief process descriptions for new process developments.
 Patents
▪ Patents (factual documents) can be useful sources of information, but some
care is needed in extracting information from them.
▪ When data from patents is used, it is important to carefully read the section
that describes the experimental procedure to be sure that the experiments were
run under appropriate conditions.
▪ Patent counselors generally try to write patents to claim broad ranges of
process conditions, so as to maximize the range of validity and make it hard
for competitors to avoid the patent by making a slight change in temperature,
pressure, or other process parameters.
▪ The examples in the patent will often indicate the best operating point.
 Accuracy required of engineering data
▪ The accuracy required depends on the use of the data will be put. The designer
must decide what accuracy is required, before spending time and money for
searching of the most accurate value or for arranging of special measurements to
be made. This will depend on several factors:
1. The level of design: Less accuracy is obviously needed for rough screening
calculations made to sort out possible alternative designs than in the final
stages of design. As the level of design increases the level of accuracy
required increases.
2. The reliability of the design methods: If there is some uncertainty in the
techniques to be used, searching out of a highly accurate physical property data
wastes time to add a little or nothing to the reliability of the final design. Using
a high accurate technique leads to a high reliable design.
3. The sensitivity to the particular property: a small error in the property highly
affects the design calculation.
▪ The accuracy of a cost estimate depends on the amount of detailed design available,
the accuracy of the cost data available, and the time spent on preparing the
estimate/evaluation. Sources of data for Capital Cost Estimates:
1. Historic Cost Data
▪ The quickest way for estimating a new plant cost is, by taking the data from the known
cost of an earlier plant that uses the same technology or from the published data. This
doesn’t require design information rather than the production rate. Experienced design
engineers usually figure out costs of plant sections from historic total plant costs.
2. Step Count Method
▪ If cost data for a similar process is not available, cost estimation can be made by
adding contributions for different plant sections or functional units. It is based on the
evidence that the cost is determined by a number of significant processing steps in the
overall process.