Electrically heated ethane cracker (Linde/BASF/SABIC STARBRIDGE concept) — a PENG-ROBINSON process flowsheet
The same ethane-to-ethylene thermal cracking chemistry as ethane-cracker, but with the furnace's radiant-coil heating supplied by an electric heater instead of a fuel-gas-fired one -- the real distinguishing feature of Linde's STARBRIDGE technology (demonstrated at industrial scale with BASF and SABIC at Ludwigshafen, 2024): resistive heating elements replace burners, transferring heat to the process coils by radiation 'in a configuration similar to conventional furnaces,' eliminating the furnace's own combustion-derived CO2 emissions (upstream grid emissions aside). Modeled here as a plain electric heater node (no fuel-gas inlet, no flue gas, no combustion stoichiometry) in place of fired_heater's combustion-fired duty -- the honest difference this technology actually is: identical process-side thermal duty and cracking chemistry, a different (electric) heat source with no direct-combustion byproduct stream. Linde's own proprietary heating-element/coilbox design, materials, and thermal efficiency figures are not published and are not fabricated here; the furnace's computed duty is a genuine energy-balance result (electric heater -> real Q required to bring the feed to cracking temperature), not a marketing number.
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- Rigorous PENG-ROBINSON thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 5 unit operations modeled: 3× Cool2, Crack, COMP, SEP, COL.
- Focus areas: Electric furnace, Steam cracking, Decarbonization, STARBRIDGE.
- Thermodynamics
- PENG-ROBINSON
- Components
- ethane, ethylene, h2
- Unit operations
- 3× Cool2CrackCOMPSEPCOL
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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("starbridge-electric-cracking-furnace")
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
Ethane steam cracker
A simplified thermal-cracking train: an equilibrium reactor converts ethane to ethylene + H2 at furnace conditions (1100 K), then a quench, compression, and a cold flash strip the H2 tail gas before a C2 splitter separates ethylene product from unconverted ethane. An equilibrium reactor is used here rather than the kinetic reactor because the latter's concentration term always uses a liquid-phase density (a real gap for a vapor-phase reaction at 1100 K) -- noted, not fixed, out of scope for this example. The C2 splitter needs many stages and high reflux since ethylene/ethane relative volatility is modest. From the ChemSep casebook (ethane cracker).
Naphtha steam cracker: furnace, quench, compression, cryo train
The full ethylene-plant process shape (steam-methane-cracking's headline technology, e.g. Linde's steam cracking line): a fired-heater convection preheat, a three-reactor lumped pyrolysis furnace, a transfer-line-exchanger quench, a primary fractionator pulling off pyrolysis gasoline, two-stage compression with interstage knockouts, selective acetylene hydrogenation, and a cryogenic cold train (cold-flash light-gas rejection, deethanizer, C2 splitter, depropanizer) delivering four real products -- ethylene, propylene, a butadiene-rich C4 cut, and a pygas/heavy-ends byproduct -- plus an H2/CH4-rich tail gas and two knockout condensate streams. Honesty notes: (1) naphtha is modeled as a single n-heptane surrogate (no fitted radical-chain kinetics exist in this codebase for real naphtha pyrolysis, so the furnace is three chained fixed-conversion reactors on real, exactly mass-balanced cracking/dehydrogenation stoichiometry -- C7H16 -> C2H4+C2H6+C3H6, C7H16 -> CH4+C2H4+C4H6+H2, and C2H4 -> C2H2+H2 for a trace acetylene impurity -- tuned to a representative, not literature-fitted, product distribution, the same 'illustrative, not fitted' posture already disclosed for saf-hefa-renewable-jet's hydrocracking lump). (2) The demethanizer is a single cold flash stage, not a rigorous multi-tray column: H2 is permanently supercritical at any realistic column pressure (Pc~13 atm vs. the ~20+ atm this train runs at), which was found during this build to corrupt the MESH solver's initial temperature-profile guess (fixed in unitops/distillation.py -- see its CLAUDE.md entry -- but even after that fix a genuine ~15 mol% H2 feed to a sharp-cut demethanizer is a hard column this solver doesn't converge on cleanly); a single flash stage rejects H2/CH4 in bulk instead, consistent with the 'cold-box front-end flash' some real designs use, but with materially worse light-key rejection than a real 20+ tray demethanizer. That carries through honestly to the ethylene product: it converges at ~77 mol% ethylene (the balance methane and H2), not polymer-grade purity -- the real number the solver computes, not an assumed spec. Propylene fares much better (~96%) since it isn't competing with as light a contaminant. (3) No BTX/aromatics extraction -- the pygas cut is reported as a single lumped heavy stream, matching saf-hefa's precedent of not resolving every real product cut.
Polymerization reactor comparison: CSTR cascade vs. tubular (PFR)
The same monomer feed, split 50/50 into two trains at equal total reactor volume: a 3-stage CSTR cascade (each stage blending its own new polymer with the MWD already carried by the stream from the stage before it) versus a single tubular (PFR) reactor. Both converge to a real, different Mn/Mw/PDI — the PFR reaches higher conversion at the same total volume, but its cumulative polydispersity is measurably broader than the cascade's, because chain length drifts continuously with conversion along the tube while each CSTR stage makes its own local production under one fixed monomer concentration. See the 'Polymerization Reactors' docs page for the full reasoning.
Helium liquefaction (Linde-Hampson cycle)
A Joule-Thomson liquefaction loop: helium is compressed, aftercooled, precooled well below its ~40-51 K JT-inversion temperature, then throttled through a valve into a flash drum that draws off liquid helium while the cold vapor recycles back to the compressor suction — the same JT-cycle physics as the platform's LNG/refrigeration loops, run on a fluid whose inversion curve makes precooling mandatory before the throttle can cool it at all.
Cement kiln calcination + CO2 liquefaction
Preheated limestone (CaCO3) enters an indirectly-heated rotary kiln that calcines it toward CaO, releasing a CO2-rich off-gas; the gas is knocked free of moisture, then compressed and cooled to liquefy the CO2 for transport/storage. Honesty notes: (1) this specific kiln model (rotary_kiln) heats via an indirect utility-temperature wall duty (an NTU model), not a simulated internal flame, so no combustion stoichiometry runs inside it here — real oxy-fuel combustion IS modeled elsewhere in this codebase (fired_heater's oxidant="oxy_co2" mode: near-pure-O2 combustion diluted by a recycled-CO2 stream instead of air's nitrogen), see allam-fetvedt-cycle for a real working example of it; (2) the calcination conversion shown (~21%) is the real, kinetically-limited result of this model's validated Arrhenius parameters at this residence time/temperature, not a claim of complete calcination — a real cement plant's preheater-tower-plus-kiln train achieves far higher calcination degree than one rotary-kiln unit alone models here; (3) CO2 must be compressed above roughly 5.2 atm before it can be liquefied by cooling at all (it has no liquid phase at 1 atm at any temperature), which the compressor stage here reflects.
NGL fractionation: single-shell Petlyuk dividing-wall column
A natural-gas-liquids cut (ethane / propane / n-butane) split into three on-spec products by ONE thermally-coupled dividing-wall column instead of two columns in series. This uses the native Petlyuk unit op: a prefractionator whose reflux and boilup are supplied by the main column (the single condenser + single reboiler), solved by an outer Wegstein loop that converges the bidirectional vapor/liquid coupling to self-consistency — the coupling legacy sequential-modular solvers approximate with two connected columns whose recycle fails to converge. Honesty note: the vapor-split and liquid-split ratios are specified inputs (not solved from tray hydraulics), and this is an outer-loop coupling of two rigorous MESH sub-solves, not a single monolithic Petlyuk MESH.