Process Design B - Week 10 2017/2018

Individual Aspen Plus Assignments

You will be assessed on the following assignments: 1, 2, 3 or 4 (choose one or the other; 4 will give
you a higher mark) and 5. In other words, assignments 1, 2 and 5 are compulsory and you also need to
choose between assignment 3 or 4 for submission.

Assignment 5 consists of submitting two of the tutorial exercises you’ve done in the class. Please do
make sure you complete your tutorials as I will be specifying in either Week 11 or 12 which ones will
need to be submitted.

Deadline for submission is Wednesday 5pm on Week 12 (28th March).

1. Set up a case with four hydrocarbons. Have these flowing into a flash drum (Flash2:2 stands
for two-phase). The flash drum has vapour and liquid product streams. These streams are in
equilibrium – the drum is an ideal stage. Set up a feed stream and see what you get in the
product streams. Try to find a condition that gives both vapour and liquid flows.
Right click on a stream and select Results. Change the form to Display: All Streams. Look at
the stream info but also try Stream Table.

If you play with the pressure drop in the separator you may be able to find a pressure at which
there is no liquid flow. You can add an energy stream to the separator and explore the effect
on the output streams of adding energy, ie. changing the duty. A duty of zero, of course, is an
adiabatic flash. Try using a Design Specification.

2. Any distillation with, at least, the DSTWU model. Check/validate your results (for instance
by comparing simulation results with back-of-the-envelope calculations; you could just try to
simulate a previously worked distillation example).

3. See Figure 1. A stream from an oil well at 20°C and 800 kPa has the following composition:

Mole fraction

Methane 0.05

Ethane 0.05

Propane 0.1

n-Butane 0.2

n-Octane 0.2

n-C12 0.4

Dr. Susana García López 14/03/18

 Process Design B - Week 10 2017/2018

(Note the n-C12 component approximates the heavier hydrocarbon fractions although Aspen Plus has
more sophisticated methods of simulating the entire hydrocarbon stream)

A choke valve reduces the pressure of the feed stream by 200 kPa before the stream is passed into the
1st stage flash drum. Gas collected from this separator is cooled to -10°C before being compressed to
700 kPa. Any liquids formed as a result of the cooling are collected and sent to join the main liquid
stream from the 1st stage flash drum. Pressure drop across the cooler is 12 psi.

Develop a model of this process using the Peng Robinson EOS (PR-BM).

Determine:

a) The composition, temperature and pressure of the gas and liquid products from this process

b) The duty of the cooler and compressor

The stream Liquid Product is predicted to be two-phase – although the vapour fraction is very small it
is not zero. What is the cause of this and how may it be prevented?

Figure 1. Separator and Knock-Out Drum

4. Figure 2 shows a flowsheet of benzene production from toluene. The flowsheet is obviously
not in Aspen form. The reaction, which takes place between s07 and s08 is:

C6H5CH3 + H2 → C6H6 + CH4

Build the flowsheet. Put Separators (add energy streams to these) as the distillation columns.
Do NOT spend a lot of time trying to make the flowsheet look better.

Feed s01: 40ºC, 25 bar, 285 kmol/h H2 and 15 kmol/h CH4

Feed s02: 25ºC, 1 bar, 108.7 kmol/h C6H5CH3

Dr. Susana García López 14/03/18

 Process Design B - Week 10 2017/2018

s06: 24 bar

s07: 330ºC

s09: 40ºC and 21 bar. This stream enters a separator. 25% of the vapour leaving the
separator is purged to remove methane; the rest is compressed and recycled.

Initially at least, make the splits perfect in the distillation columns so that the first distillation
has only benzene and toluene in the bottoms and the second distillation has pure benzene
product in the tops and recycles pure toluene. I ran the first distillation at 20 bar and the
second distillation at 12 bar. The pump recycles the toluene.

I used an RSTOIC reactor – see notes for reactors. Put a conversion of 75%.

You could try replacing the Component Splitters with proper distillation columns if you feel
brave. I used DSTWU models; I had to use a Partial Condenser with all vapour distillate in
the first column – I guess because it’s hard to condense methane plus hydrogen. A total
condenser was OK in the second column.

H2 / CH4 s11
s13 s12
s01
Benzene
s03 s10 s15
s17
s06 s07 s08 s09
s14

s05 s16
PUMP
s04 s18

s02

Toluene

Figure 2. Benzene from Toluene

5. Two of the tutorial exercises.

Just a reminder of what you need to include in your write-up document (either pdf or word) that
you need to submit along with your Aspen plus files for assessment:

1. For those assignments where you are given the freedom to select components and input
conditions, specify which ones you have selected.

2. For all the assignments, clearly mention which property package you have selected and WHY.

3. Assess/discuss validity of your results, i.e., compare them with expected results (you can make
use of steam tables, back-of-the envelope calculations, etc...) and discuss potential sources
for discrepancies, if any.

Dr. Susana García López 14/03/18