Industrielle Chemie: Open Access

Abstrakt

Chemical Process Design for Manufacture of Xylene Isomers

Guy Francis Mongelli

According to the World Energy Outlook, the demand for coal will increase if conservative measures are not taken. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions will increase from coal use. Current manufacturing facilities use a large amount of external utilities, but measures can be taken to reduce the amount of energy such a facility needs by using energy generated from process streams. Using process data from a process of toluene conversion, the energy requirements for a pilot scale and full-scale manufacturing plant were minimized using pinch analysis and the resulting heat exchanger network was designed. A cost analysis was performed to determine the monetary savings associated with the new plant design, as well as the amount of coal saved as a result. Since para-xylene is the most valuable xylene isomer produced, the production of the isomer was optimized by modeling the concentration profiles with several reactor systems. The dynamics of a heat exchanger were examined and modeled using the heat exchanger equation. The temperature profile as a function of both time and exchanger position was obtained using both a finite element analysis and using an analytical solution.