Integrated Design for session 2015/2016

EKC 367
Semester II - Integrated Design
Submission Due Date: on or before 11 May 2016, 11.30am

Production of Methanol through hydrogenation of CO/CO2

Methanol has been used as the feed for the production of acetic acid and formaldehyde. As
continue from your integrated design in Year 1 and Year 2, in this work, a section of the
process design that involved the separation of methanol and water is outlined as below. In the
process, the methanol-water stream is then heated to 80C and sent to distillation column to
separate the water from the methanol. In this tower, a methanol-rich stream, containing
approximately 99.86 mol% of methanol is taken as top product and sent to a central methanol
storage vessel. The water comes out as bottom product contains a lot of impurities and need
to be sent to wastewater treatment plant for further treatment.

Given the components and composition of the main stream, perform the energy balance on all
streams and on both heat exchanger.

Figure 1: Methanol Distillation column

Table 1: Stream result from Figure 1

Stream

S-1

S-2

S-3

S-9

S-12

Temperature (oC)

80

65

60

90

100

Pressure (bar)

Vapor fraction

Reflux ratio

0.84

Reboiler ratio

6.28

Flow rate (ton/hr)

Methanol

107.09

196.86

196.86

0.78

0.67

Water

15.42

0.30

0.30

111.13

95.87

As the safety officer in your department, you and your teammates are ask to submit a
complete safety report based on the following requirement:

1.

HAZID is a technique that provides hands on review of Work Plan for the early

identification of potential hazards and threats. In order to ensure a safe working environment
for all plant operators, your team is request to prepare a check list that focusing on the
separation process and the safety of equipment. Please prepare not more than 20 related
questions.
2.

The line section from S-1 to S-8 and D-101 and line section from S-9 to S-13 are

served as the description nodes, perform a HAZOP study.

3.

What are the specific recommendations that you can make in order to improve the

safety of this process? Please provide your suggestions with the schematic sketch (freehand
sketching is also acceptable).