Simulation of Absorption & Distillation Using 2nd Generation Rate-Based

Distillation Webinar Frequently Asked Questions

1) What do you mean by segments, do you mean the number of packing units?

Segments is simply an approximation, it is sort of what was done in the demo is exactly the
same thing. We have a column of a particular height, you can describe it as 12 units or 36
units, and if you go from 12 to 36 the segment height will drop by a factor of 3, and as
mentioned before, hopefully the segment height should be small enough so that it does not
affect the results anymore. Because that is really not a parameter that we should vary. In
effect what we are trying to do is get to the point where there is continuous distribution, so it
should be small enough such that it is effectively continuous.

2) By assuming lower efficiency in the equilibrium model could we get the same
results in the rate-based model?

Several column models use efficiency correlations that consider things like the throughput or
maybe the transfer properties of the material. The trouble with using efficiency and correlating
efficiency against the operating conditions is that the form of the equations is never really a
perfect match and as a results as you expect to extrapolate away from the conditions where
those correlations were fitted you have less and less reliability with respect to matching the
real world.

When you use a rate-based model like RateSep the form of the equations is appropriate,
these are correlations based on engineering fundamentals such as the Reynolds number and
other dimensionless variables associated with that process, and as a result it does a better
job of extrapolating away from the conditions over which the model is fitted so a first
principals model like RateSep will always do a better job than a correlative model which you
may have seen from other vendors.

3) How do you get a good convergence in these type of electrolyte rate systems?

The more consistent to make it to reality, the easier it is to converge. Try to figure out if I am
doing something this is in-consistent with reality. If you come in with a lean solvent
particularly for chemical systems, you will find that it is going to be very hard to converge, but
the fact of the matter is that in reality you can not get such a lean solvent because it costs
you a lot of steam to that down. Starting simple and keep it consistent with the way a plant
operates. Start simple get profiles and pull results into MS Excel see what is missing, if you
get the physics right, the physical model, some of the kinetic parameters, seems like that is
95% of the time where the convergence problems come from. Or it could be mathematics;
there are a lot of derivatives involved maybe one of them could be bad. With a combination of
these steps we should be able to eliminate convergence being an issue and get back to
doing engineering.
Convergence is somewhat of an art sometimes. There are two issues on convergence, one is
the column itself, and the other one is the flow sheet that the column is within. In this case the
flow sheet has a very large recycle loop between the two columns and is always a difficult
situation to converge. One thing you can look at is to use equation oriented modeling to
converge that loop, and the other thing you can do is make sure you properly account for the
losses of the solvent and have a make up stream for the solvent. There is some tricks that
you can use for example with a calculator block to fine tune to make up stream, to make it
match the losses and that will in some cases accelerate your convergence. The other thing to
consider with the column itself, first you have to converge the equilibrium model and then it
goes into rate-based, now if that equilibrium model does not converge perfectly you are often
still ok when it flips into the rate-based model it will usually converge there, so even if you get
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some errors in the equilibrium model as you go into the rate-based model as long as that final
calculations converge you are ok.

4) Is this program available in Aspen HYSYS?

Today this is available in Aspen Plus as an extension of the RadFrac model Moving forward
we are exposing several of the Aspen plus unit operation models with in the Aspen HYSYS
environment under the Aspen Plus model library option that is used under EO model and we
do plan to make Aspen RateSep available in the mode starting with version V8 of Aspen
HYSYS.

5) The demo indicated several errors, was the model converged?

The new run control panel leads to a table that records all the warnings and errors that occur
during the convergence of the flow sheet. One is all the errors that occur during the
mathematical algorithm get into a solution you will see them recorded in that table. However
what is important is that last pass of the convergence have no errors, and you will see that in
the main diagnostic flag (Lower right corner of the simulator). If that flag says no errors,
results available with no errors then it is the indication that the last pass had no errors or
warning and that is the important part. What you saw there in the control panel was the
intermediate errors that occurred during the solution sequence.

6) Do the mass transfer coefficients depend on the particular molecules being

separated?

Yes the Aspen RateSep model calculates the transport properties based on the composition
at each point in the column, so it will depend on exactly what is present there. One of the
things that we have done with the sample models that are available is that we have fine tuned
the transport properties as well as the phase equilibrium parameters for a wide range of
common solvents with CO2, H2S and some of the other trace gasses that are typically
present.

7) Using more stages resulted in a higher CO2 concentration in the product gas. I
would have expected a lower concentration; at the worst I would have expected the
same concentration. Please comment.

What is shown on the X-axis is not the number of stages but the segment height, so as the
segment height went down the concentration of the CO2 in the product gas also went down.
The dark blue line (in the presentation graph: Effect of H2S concentration in Lean Solvent –
on Needed Segment Height) shows that as the segment height gets smaller the
concentration of CO2 in the product gas decreases and in fact the limit should be at zero
segment height, but of course you can’t get these because of the stages, but we want it to
settle down at a some value. It is plotted against segment height not number of stages.

8) Why did concentration go up with increased segments in the demo?

In the case that was used for the demo the other factors such as the amount of steam being
placed in the stripper were not being controlled, and also there was a fixed temperature
concentration on the feed heat exchanger which slightly raised the temperature of the lean
solution going back into the absorber, that is one of the factors that caused the less
absorption to occur. It was an indirect effect of the fact that we run it a little bit hotter. In this
particular demo no provisions were made for maintaining a certain temperature coming back
into the absorber with the lean solution, so the lean solution comes in a little bit hotter which
adds for more temperature. The analysis that was done in the presentation correctly pointed
out that the smaller the height, the less the concentration of the absorber overhead is correct
that is maintaining the same state conditions coming into the absorber, of course the
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presentation also showed that the more CO2 that you have coming back into the lean
solution, the higher the concentration of CO2 coming out of the absorber. It was a system
effect that was not accounted for when design specifications were added into the model.

9) Have rate-based models found utility in ultra-high purity distillation?

Not quite sure what ultra-high purity distillation means, but for example when distilling air and
so on. But often times when you are doing that sort of thing it is better to go with experience
and if indeed the efficiencies are up to the order of 90+% as they often are for many of these,
then maybe it is better to go with the old technology. Ultimately as practicing engineers we
still have the old tools and we have the new tools, and we should look at them as a suite of
tools and apply whatever that makes the most sense in the particular application, and that
includes the expertise of the organization, the experience base, etc. Modeling is just one
idea.

10) What I saw in the presentation, I understood that the segment height should be
small enough, but what is the final number of segments which should be used to
get a true picture of the model. Does the final concentration converge at some
segments?
The answer comes back to specifically what system you are modeling, so usually what we do
is you would start with a reasonable number of segments, you would assume say a segment
height of 20 cm as a good starting point, and run some simulations cases where you increase
the number of stages, so you could reduce the segment height from 20 cm to 15-10 cm and
eventually what you will see is that most of your predictions will start to line out and that tells
you that you have used a fine enough level of discretization, so you have enough stages or
small enough segment height. There is a few parameters in the Aspen RateSep model that
will make a difference on how many stages you will need, and one of those is something
called the flow model and that is on the rate-based tab sheet. There are several flow models,
one is mixed, in the mixed flow model you are assuming that the composition leaving the tray
is the same as what is on the tray, and that works best for tray column. There is another
option what is called the counter current mixing flow model, and that is best for packed
columns, and if you use that counter current model you will generally get better results in a
fewer stages than if you use the fixed model. Another thing to consider is the film
discretization, if you have a reactor system like MEA, Aspen RateSep offer one big
advantage over predecessors like RateFrac in that you can discretize the film into a number
of elements and when you have reactions that will give you much better accuracy, so for
MEA and MDEA and some of the fast reacting systems if you use film discretization with one
or two elements in the film, again you will get better results for the same number of stages, or
you can use fewer stages to get an accurate representation of the process.

11) Does it mean that you will always have to install a packed column with design
made with rate based distillation?

No, it does not mean that at all but if you want to use state of the art rate-based calculations it
is advisable, especially if it is a new application. What rate-based distillation does is that it
adds another layer of equations so that you can do mass and heat transfer calculations, just
as you do heat transfer calculations on a heat exchanger for example so you don’t have to
use a fudge factor such as it is used today as efficiency. Of course you don’t have to do this if
you know your distillation columns well and you know that for a particular application, a
particular type of packing you can get such and such purity. But if you want to add more
science to your analysis, then it is recommended that rate-based distillation be used.

12) Can rate-based distillation give good results if a mixture of solvents is used, such
as DEA/MDEA mixture?
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Just as the previous answer, the first thing to do is sometimes in a mixed solvent you have to
figure out weather the model predictions are good. If chemical solvents are mixed sometimes
you get a bump in the middle of the base model, and then you need data to figure out if the
bump in the middle is indeed correct and often times it is not. The next one is that, again it
requires us to go back and be engineers is to ask weather the chemical effects are the same,
is it forming the same intermediate species, like if we have chemical solvents in some cases
it may want to form a coamide, in other cases it might want to form a bicarbonate. Rate-
based distillation is just another tool that can help engineers understand the system, the best
thing for us to do as engineers is “trust but verify”, to be skeptical of what could possibly go
wrong, particularly if it is giving you a very favorable result, to ask weather if the favorable
result is because of the new technology or because of a simulation problem. The key is that
there is no substitute for good education.

13) Segment height is similar to HETP, you used 20 ft of packing and IMTP packing in
I2 stages, and if you had 1.7 ft HETP and when you want 36 stages, then your HETP
is 0.5 ft while using same IMTP packing, my understanding is that packing has
certain HETPs so do we need to use different types of packing?

When you speak about rate-based distillation it is not applicable to say HETP anymore.
HETP is a term applied only to equilibrium based distillation. For example if you say you got
10 theoretical stages, you multiply the number of stages by the HETP and that gives you the
amount of packing. Now when you move into the rate-based distillation world the HETP term
is not applicable anymore. What you do in a rate-based distillation world is you set a packing
height: 20 ft, or 30, ft, or 40 ft what have you, and then the question is how much
discretization do you want to have in order to do a calculation that is correct. Discretization is
the business of segments, do I have 10 segments, 20 segments or 100 segments, the
number of segments is the number that divides the packing height, then you can say the
segment is 0.5 in, or 2 in, or 5 in or 6 in. My advice to you is, try to abandon the concept of
HETPs and efficiency when you are talking about rate-based distillation.

Once way you can use the HETP estimates if you have it, is that gives you the baseline for
how many segments you need. So if you take the actual height of packing divide it by the
HETP you need at least that many segments in your model, you probably should have
somewhat more than that.

14) Given that rate-based segments are integral slices; in the case of a trayed tower,
how do I determine how many stages would be needed if the rate-based results
require 750 segments (or integral slices)?

The segmenting concept only applies to packed columns; if it is a tray column you specify the
number of trays and the correlations will take care of the rest for you. That is one of the
beauties of rate-based modeling, with a tray column you don’t have to worry about efficiency
factors, and you don’t have to worry about theoretical stages like you would with an
equilibrium based column.

15) Is height of segment is the total height of packing?

No height of segment is the total height of packing divided by the number of segments.

16) Is there much more of a benefit with using rate-based distillation over doing a
much more simpler approach to equilibrium design with published equilibrium
curves, it seems like there is a greater chance of error in utilizing the rate-based
simulation and getting lost in the amount of details required?

That depends on the stage of your work. If you are doing preliminary work or you are just
scoping out a process design weather you need to be working with things like the trade off
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between energy and purity, or energy and equipment size and so forth, at that stage you may
use the equilibrium approach because you may need to do several dozen simulations at that
time. Now when you get to the stage when you are doing equipment design you may want to
use rate-based distillation, and as mentioned if the results look too good be skeptical, and
mistakes can be made that cost a lot of pain, so it depends on the stage of the project you
are in, if you are doing scoping work, comparing one type of configuration vs. another, that
type of general analysis of relative comparison of processes, you can perhaps get away with
doing your calculations on an equilibrium basis. But again when it comes down to doing
detailed design of a column I would personally use a more detailed state of the art tool like
rate-based analysis.

A lot of the equilibrium curves that you can see from a vendor; they might be fitted using a
very simple system like water/air and they are not accounting for what is happening in reality
and so if you have a complicated system with lots of components, there could be interactions
between the components either through reactions or through the transport properties, like a
higher molecular weight component can make the overall solution viscosity much higher for
example. The rate-based models will account for that implicitly, the correlation based models
will often miss much of that so again these efficiency curves are basically a correlation and
they are only as good as the range over which they are fitted, so we expect that a mass
transfer model will do better away from the conditions over which it was originally verified
compared to efficiency curves or correlations.

17) If I know that my system has the ability to form foam, how this can be modeled
using RateFrac?

That is something that you don’t need Aspen RateSep for, I think that is more of a hydraulic
analysis that you need to do and there are packing or pack rating or tray rating paragraphs in
the equilibrium model are able to help you with those calculations with things like calculations
of flooding factors and things like that, but I suppose there can be some way of also tweaking
some of the rate-based calculations performing.

I think it typically relates to surface tension, sometimes minor contaminants. I think there is a
lot of good reading in literature that would help, lot of text books talk about distillation
practice, operation, troubleshooting, and so on.

18) Are multi component mass transfer effects considered in the rate-based model?

Yes, it does indeed use the Maxwell-Stefan correlation, which is really quite complicated and
deals with multi-component mass transfer going in both directions. The mathematics of it is
good, and there are nice papers on it. But again for us from the point of view of practical
engineers, one of the things that has not been seen is a good analysis on is exactly where
each of the binary contributions affect it, and where is one more important than the other. We
(Fluor) have simply taken the results (the best data we have had) and applied a factor on top
of it, but it would be good if somebody did a more detailed analysis because that is probably
what is needed. The simple answer is that in principle the correlation but in practice it needs
to be tested much more thoroughly.
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