ChE382: Process Evaluation and Chemical Systems Design II

Prof. Davis and Prof. Okorafor

Course Syllabus

Course Description:

This is the capstone design course; students are required to work in groups to site, design, and cost a chemical plant and give a quantitative conclusion about its overall economic value. The course is project-based; it requires the completion of two process designs, an ethylene production process and one of two possible final projects.

For the ethylene project (Project 1), students will work in groups of three assigned by the instructor. Each group is assigned a different mix of raw materials (propane, butane, or ethane/propane at a 3:1/1:3 ratio), different amounts of ethane recycle, and different properties of generated superheated steam. The students are expected to design and cost the following pieces of equipment: cracking furnace, quench tower, multi-stage compressor, demethanizer, deethanizer, ethylene/ethane splitter, depropanizer, propylene/propane splitter, debutanizer, heat exchangers, flash towers, and pumps. Other assignments include: a steam balance calculation, implications of "green engineering" to the process, and consideration of safety procedures. The strategy employed has the instructor outline the design of the plant in class to demonstrate how an engineer-driven design is carried out, while the students use simulation software to visualize their design. Each group will submit a written report describing their process flow diagram and the calculations they did to create it. The ethylene plant capacity will be 700 metric tons per day of 99.95% purity with a stream factor of 8400 operating hours/year.

For the second project, the students will remain in the same groups. This project will be similar in type and scope to the first one, but there will be limited in-class instruction and each group will present on their progress four times and have three formal meetings. There will be two different types of projects assigned; they will be announced later on this semester.

Example Student Projects:

Example Project Report