4.7.

FLOWSHEETS WITH RECYCLE 207

Figure 4.36. Adjust specifications.

4.7. FLOWSHEETS WITH RECYCLE

Recycles of solvents, catalysts, unconverted feed materials, and byproducts are found
in many processes. Most processes contain at least one material recycle, and some may
have six or more. Furthermore, when energy is recovered by process-to-process heat
transfer, then energy recycles are created, as discussed in Section 4.5.4.

4.7.1. Tearing the Flowsheet

For a sequential-modular simulation program to be able to solve a flowsheet with a
recycle, the design engineer needs to provide an initial estimate of a stream some-
where in the recycle loop. This is known as a ‘‘tear’’ stream, as the loop is ‘‘torn’’ at
that point. The program can then solve and update the tear stream values with a new
estimate. The procedure is repeated until the difference between values at each
iteration becomes less than a specified tolerance, at which point the flowsheet is
said to be converged to a solution.