10.

490 ICE I - Continuous Process Design Fall 2018

Assignment 2 (group): Basic Data Report

Purpose: Assignment 2 will take you through the entire design sequence in a short time. We do
this by sacrificing depth, particularly omitting performance calculations of unit operations. You
will also get some spreadsheet practice.

Statement: You are an engineer supporting business development for a petrochemical plant.
Your plant has a ready supply of chloromethane, and you are considering further chlorination to
produce dichloromethane and chloroform. You embark on a quick estimate of its business
potential. As described in the Outline of a Design Procedure document, you assemble
information pertinent to the market, process, safety, and profitability.

• How much information? Enough to allow you to answer the designer’s two questions.
• How accurate an answer? You are trying to identify losers quickly so that you can get on
with something better. You will do your forecasting with approximate methods, so the
answers will be approximate. If approximate methods reveal no show-stoppers, and the
numbers turn out reasonably pleasing, the engineer may conclude that the prospect
deserves a further look.
• Should you obsess over this? No. Estimate quantities that you can’t find, especially if they
don’t have much effect on the results. The key to this exercise is using tools to get a good
form of an answer; we’ll improve the numbers in due course.

This is a group project - divide up the searching and then collaborate on the decisions. At the
end of it, suggest a production goal for a plant, make an estimate of profitability, identify the
chemical hazards to be faced, and propose a flowsheet (main operations only) with spreadsheet
material balance. As stated above, the MB need not depend on rigorous calculations for the
performance of process operations.

Required: Submit a report comprising

• cover letter that contains your market, safety, and economic conclusions
• market assessment
• economic assessment
• chemical safety assessment
• process flowsheet and spreadsheet MB
• basic data package summarizing your literature review

Use the report template accompanying this problem statement; it elaborates on each of these
topics and takes care of formatting.

ALSO, please submit your working MB spreadsheet file separately.

Background: Designers must answer the “Can we?” and “Should we?” questions; in this
overview exercise, we focus on the latter. In the rest of the term, we will concentrate on
technical analysis, which will give us more confidence in the asserted material and energy
balance, and thus technical feasibility.

rev. 2018 Sep 7

10.490 ICE I - Continuous Process Design Fall 2018
Assignment 2 (group): Basic Data Report
How do you know which unit operations to use? At each stage, take account of the composition,
conditions, and form of each stream and decide how it can be made more like the final product.

We recommend using a spreadsheet for the MB because its cellular nature is well-adapted to
stream tables. Once you have the sheet working, it’s easy to change conditions and assumptions
to advance your design.

How can you compute the material balance around, e.g., a separation unit when you do not know
how the unit performs? In the early stages, we specify desired performance and calculate the
MB consequences. In time, the wishes will be replaced with realistic estimates, but the benefits
of the MB can be realized from the earliest stages of design. By the way, do not embed
performance numbers for such quantities as “reactor conversion”, “fraction of solvent lost in
waste”, “fraction of feed taken overhead” inside your cell formulas. Rather, put these
performance specifications in a separate table, so that you can easily vary them and check
limiting cases, as well as make your assumptions clear. (Not hard-coding numbers into your
formulas is good practice, in general).

How do you use circular references in a spreadsheet to solve recycle loops? Spreadsheets do
that, but you shouldn’t need to. Instead, specify your streams from the feeds and products,
working inward toward recycle loops, using the performance numbers to define the inner streams
through material balances.

rev. 2018 Sep 7