Fatty alcohols from methyl ester hydrogenolysis — a PENG-ROBINSON process flowsheet
High-pressure hydrogenolysis of a fatty acid methyl ester over a copper-chromite catalyst to the corresponding fatty alcohol plus methanol byproduct, the route used by natural-fatty-alcohol producers such as Oxiteno. Modeled with methyl palmitate as the ester feed (the C₁₆ member of the coconut/palm-kernel-derived ester slate these plants actually run); a flash removes unreacted hydrogen for recycle and a partial-condenser column recovers methanol overhead from the crude fatty alcohol. The column runs a vapor distillate because the flash liquid still carries dissolved hydrogen, and its distillate rate is set to the feed's light-component fraction — ask for more overhead than there is light material and the column can only meet the spec by dragging fatty alcohol up with it.
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- Rigorous PENG-ROBINSON thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 4 unit operations modeled: MIX, RX, Flash, COL.
- Focus areas: Hydrogenolysis, Oleochemicals, Fatty alcohols.
- Thermodynamics
- PENG-ROBINSON
- Components
- methyl_palmitate, hydrogen, 1_hexadecanol, methanol
- Unit operations
- MIXRXFlashCOL
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Read the step-by-step guideReproduce this exact result from Python — the real client.get_example() → run_and_wait() path, not a mockup.
from flowsim.sdk import FlowSimClient
client = FlowSimClient()
example = client.get_example("fatty-alcohols-hydrogenolysis")
sim = client.create_simulation(example["title"], example["flowsheet"])
result = client.run_and_wait(sim["id"])
print(result["status"]) # "converged"
streams = client.streams(sim["id"])Related models
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