University Of Salahaddin

College of Engineering Industrial Unit Operation

Chemical & Petrochemical Engineering Department
Fourth Year
Lecture No.1

Unit operations – involve certain type of processes carried out in a specific

equipment
Examples of unit operations:
▪ milling, grinding – involve mechanical processes
▪ fluid transportation, filtration settling, fluidization, mixing – involve
hydromechanical processes
▪ heat exhange, evaporation – involve energy (heat) transport
▪ extraction, absorption, drying, distillation, membranes – involve mass transport
▪ reactors, bioreactors – involve chemical reaction

Another classification of processes:

batch (discontinual) processes – occur in a closed system (such as batch reactor)
combined (semibatch) processes – occur in a system open to a part of mass and
closed to another part (such as a drier with a batch of material dried by air flowing
through)
continual (flow) processes – occur in an open system (such as a flow-through
reactor, pipe, rectification column, etc.)

Ideal mixing – all particles have the same probability of occurring anywhere in a
vessel (usually stirrred).
 Basics of balance equations

Open and Closed Systems

a. System
a system define such as a reactor, a section of a pipe. Or, you can define the limits of the system by drawing
the system boundary, namely a line that encloses the portion of the process that you want to analyze.

b. Closed System

Figure 1.1 shows a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional vessel holding 1000 kg of H2O. Note that
material neither enters nor leaves the vessel, that is, no material crosses the system boundary. Changes can take
place inside the system, but for a closed system, no massexchange occurs with thesurroundings.

Figure 1.1 A closed system.

c. Open System
Figure 1.2 is an example of an open system (also called a flowsystem)because materialcrosses the system
boundary.

Figure 1.2 An open steady–state system.

1.3 Steady-State and Unsteady-State Systems

a. Steady–State System

Because the rate of addition of water is equal to the rate of removal, the amount of waterin the vessel shown in
Figure 1.2 remains constant at its original value (1000kg). We call such a process or system a steady–state
process or a steady–state system.

b. Unsteady–State System

Because the amount of water in the system changes with time (Figure 1.3), the processandsystem are deemed to
be an unsteady–state (transient) process or system.
Figure 1.3 Initial conditions for an open unsteady–state system withaccumulation.

The material balance for a single component process is

1.1

If the process is in the steady state, the accumulation term by definition is zero, and Equation6.1 simplifies to
a famoustruism

What goes in must come out (In =Out) 1.2

If you are analyzing anunsteady-stateprocess,the accumulation term over a time interval

can be calculated as:

1.3

When you combine Equations 6.1 and 6.3 you get the general material balance for a component in
the system in the absence of reaction:

1.4

1.4 Accounting for Chemical Reactions in MaterialBalances

Chemical reaction in a system requires the augmentation of Equation 6.4 to take into account the effects of
the reaction. To illustrate this point,look at Figure 6.10, which shows a steady–state system in which HCl
reacts with NaOH by the followingreaction:
Figure 1.4 Reactor for neutralizing HCl with NaOH.

Equation 1.4 must be augmented to include terms for the generation and
consumptionof components by the chemical reaction in the system asfollows

1.5

1.5 Recycle, Bypass, Purge, and the Industrial Application of Material

Balances
Recycle is fed back from a downstream unit to an upstream unit, as shown in
Figure1.5c. The stream containing the recycled material is known as a recyclestream.

Because of the relatively high cost of industrial feed stocks, recycle of unused reactants
to the reactor can of significant economic savings for high-volume processing systems.

Figure 1.5: Figure 1.5a shows a single unit with serial flows. Figure 1.5b showsmultiple units but still
with serial flows. Figure 1.5c shows the addition ofrecycle.