Termwork 6- Cyclohexane production simulation

Production of cyclohexane by the reaction:- Benzene + 3hydrogen =

Cyclohexane

Feed line 1 feed line 3

Benzene 100 Hydrogen 330
100% kmol/h 93% kmol/h
40°C Nitrogen 2% 50°C
methane
1 bar 5% 25 bar

99.99% purity of cyclohexane is recovered after distillation from bottoms

Simulation :-

Initially, all of the components involved are added.

Defining benzene and hydrogen feed lines

As the process has a recycle involved, it is simulated after each step of adding an equipment.

In the flowsheet firstly, the benzene (line1) and mixed hydrogen streams (line 3) for the sake of
mixing are added to a mixer which is then fed to heater via line 2. (It was done only till the mixer
part, the diagram only shows excess components)

The outlet of the combined streams is assumed to be at 24 bar.

The output of heat exchanger is set at 150 °C and a pressure drop of 1 bar.

Rstoic reactor is selected in which only the conversion of benzene = 99.8% is specified. The reaction
conditions are fed in alongwith reaction stoichiometry.
The output of reactor has the following compositions.

A separation column is added thereafter as shown with following output

The image above shows input parameters of the distillation column. Two separators are added. Line
13 is a purge line having 1% of the feed to separator (line 7).The loop is step by step completed by
connecting lines 12 & 15 with the initial mixer.
On completing the loop and simulating there was a convergence error. For countering this number
of iterations and tolerance were increased accordingly.

Finally a distillation column is added specifying the final product requirements and the
reflux ratio (=3). The feed to it is as shown above.
Distillation column parameter specifications

Final product stream of cyclohexane is obtained with required purity.

Summary :- In the above exercise we simulated a complete process having a mixer,

heat exchanger, separators, reactors and distillation columns. We also came to know that
loop operations need to be simulated step by step and not whole at once. The tolerance had
to be increased and so had to be the number of iterations for the results to converge.
Around 9 trays were required for the distillation column which is well justified and practical
as well.