Design and Professional Skills

Excel Flowsheeting Tutorial 1

Process
The chlorination of benzene to form monochlorobenzene and dichlorobenzene proceeds
according to the following scheme:
6 6 + 2 6 5 +

(1)

6 6 + 22 6 4 2 + 2

(2)

Initially, you should assume a basis of 100 kmol h-1 of benzene being fed to the reactor
and that for every 1 mole of benzene fed to the reactor, 0.9 moles of chlorine are fed
(when you consider a recycle later, this ratio is still maintained, and you should alter the
quantities of fresh reactants accordingly).
Reactor
The conversion of benzene is 55.3 mol%. The subsequent yields to monochlorobenzene
and dichlorobenzene are 73.7 mol% and 26.3 mol% respectively. Additionally-substituted
chlorobenzenes are also formed, but their yield can be assumed to be negligible in
comparison to those of mono- and di-chlorobenzene.
Condenser
The products from the reactor are fed to a condenser-separator, in which the organic
compounds condense. The chlorine and HCl gases are separated from the liquid organics
and fed to an absorption column. The liquid organics are fed to a distillation column. It is
assumed that there is a perfect separation of gases and organics in the condenserseparator.
Absorption Column
The gaseous products are passed to an absorption column in which the HCl is removed
through dissolution in water. All of the HCl is removed, but 2 mol% of the chlorine is also
absorbed and leaves in stream 8. The amount of water used means that the HCl in the
absorber outlet is 30% (w/w).
It is possible to recycle the chlorine in stream 6 to the reactor feed.

Design and Professional Skills

Distillation Column
The organic products from the condenser-separator are passed fed to a distillation
column. All of the chlorobenzenes leave the column in the bottoms product, along with 5
mol% of all benzene that enters the column.
It is possible to recycle the benzene in stream 9 to the reactor feed.

Tutorial
An excel file named ChlorinationPlantBlank.xlsx is now available on Canvas. You should
download this file now. Rename a new version in which you can make changes, and then
attempt to complete the material balance in order to answer the following questions:
1. When no recycle is present, what is the feed flowrate of benzene required in order
to produce 1 tonne day-1 of monochlorobenzene? (Ans: 0.909 kmol h-1)
2. What is the overall yield of monochlorobenzene with respect to benzene? (Ans:
40.76%)
3. After the inclusion of recycle streams for unreacted benzene and chlorine, what is
the overall yield of monochlorobenzene with respect to benzene? (Ans: 70.84%)

Hints
The overall yield of monochlorobenzene with respect to benzene is given by:
=

10 []
1 []

This yield definition is slightly different to others that weve used (including on the
Chlorination Reactor sheet where yield refers to how much of the consumed
benzene goes to a certain product) but it just helps to serve as a measure of how
much useful MCB product we get out versus how much benzene precursor we put
in.
Make sure that you reference other cells in formulae rather than using numbers.
Youll notice that some of the cells in the reactor sheet have names; you should get
into the habit of naming important cells so that your formulae are easier to
understand and so that your spreadsheets are more tractable if you have to come
back to them after a period of time. Follow on from the first sheet by naming other
cells in later sheets.