The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

ChE 142 Lecture

9/12/16
Prof. Davis

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Characteristics of Separations
1. Separation processes require a major fraction of the
capital and operating cost of many chemical plants.
2. The majority of the design variables or degrees of
freedom are involved with the separation processes.
3. The effectiveness of the separations often control
profitability in:

Raw materials intensive processes

Processes which involve high value products

4. There are many similarities between seemingly

different separation processes.
5. The literature on separations is very extensive and
disperse.
Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Chemistry v. Chemical Engineering

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Chemists v. ChemEs using Sep.

Chemists use analytical separation
techniques (e.g. chromatography,
electrophoresis) and preparative separation
techniques to quantify, recover, and purify
small amounts of chemicals
ChemEs still recover and purify things, but on
a much larger scale the science and theory
are similar, but not the same
Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Goals of Chemical Engineering

Typically, your goal as a ChemE is to
design/control/model/retrofit a process
which makes large quantities of a useful
product at a consistent specification
quickly, safely, economically, and in an
environmentally sound manner.
This course will teach you about the
separations layer of process design.
Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Onion Diagram
Why reactors
first?
Why
separations
before HEX?
Source: Foo et al.
Chemical Engineering
Progress October 2005

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Chapter 1: Separation Processes

Summary of objectives:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Role of sep. processes in society

5 general categories for sep. units
Equipment types for each category
Specification methods (specs)
Selection of feasible equipment

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Motivation for this Class

Separation techniques have been essential to
modern society. We historically have used
separations to:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Get perfume and dyes from plants

Get salt from seawater (crystallization)
Make coffee or tea (leaching)
Distill liquors (distillation)
Make medicines (asprin, aloe)
Recover chemicals from waste, etc.

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Crude Oil Refining

Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Examples of Natural Separations

Dialysis in the human kidney
The water cycle providing clean water
Your lungs separate O2 from air and CO2 from
blood
How do each of these work physically?
What is the mechanism (physical
phenomenon) which creates the separation?
Chemical Engineering Department

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Small Scale Example / Espresso

See p. 653 of
textbook

Chemical Engineering Department