Analysis of a complex plant-steady state and transient behavior

Abstract In recent years with the proliferation of high-speed digital computers the digital computation has gained wide-spread acceptance in all areas of chemical engineering activity. The simulation of chemical, petroleum, metallurgical and similar processes is now a commonplace item for chemical engineers. In the last decade the computer programs were mere replacements of simple repetitive manual calculations. However, very soon the inadequacies of conventional techniques gave rise to development of such procedures which are reliable, flexible, accurate and suited to digital computation. Accordingly, a good deal of effort has been expended in trying to develop methods by which the principles of simulation can be applied to real problems. The recent developments in computing procedures coupled with the continuously increasing capabilities of successive generations of computers enables one to cope with process design problems on an increasingly broader basis. Among the most tedious and repetitive problems of the process design is that of calculating heat and mass balances. Calculation of steady-state and transient heat and material balances is of fundamental importance for the study of economics of particular processes and for discrimination of plant design alternatives. Before major equipments in a complex plant, as, e.g. countercurrent separation towers, heat exchangers, etc. can be designed the inlet specifications to the specific unit must be known. Evidently, this information cannot be gained without performing rigorous heat and mass balances. Generally speaking, chemical engineering systems lead to governing equations which are strongly nonlinear because of presence of equilibrium and rate expressions. In addition, a great deal of problems involves distributed parameter systems which for the transient simulation give rise to the coupled set of nonlinear partial differential equations. During the past decade, to tackle process design problems of this complexity several chemical process and petroleum companies, consulting firms and academic institutions developed general integrated digital computer programs for steady-state and transient simulation provided frequently with process-oriented input description, automatic sequencing of computation, built-in unified physical data bank, provision for convergence and standard unit operation subroutines.

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