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Haber–Bosch Process Flowsheets & Simulations

Explore 4 validated, solved Haber–Bosch simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: n2, h2, ammonia, argon, methane. Open any one directly in your browser.

Solved via: PENG-ROBINSON.

SYN
RX
NH3
NEOM, Saudi Arabia

Green ammonia synthesis

An equilibrium reactor runs N₂ + 3H₂ ⇌ 2NH₃ on green-hydrogen syngas (Keq illustrative) — the new-energy leapfrog workflow.

3 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

223 0

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Fresh
MIX
RX
COOL
Flash
NH3 Product
Split
Recycle COMP
Purge
Yara Porsgrunn, Norway

Ammonia synthesis loop (Haber-Bosch, ChemSep casebook)

The classic industrial ammonia loop: fresh syngas joins recycled unconverted gas, reacts over an equilibrium reactor (N₂ + 3H₂ ⇌ 2NH₃) at synthesis conditions, is chilled to condense high-purity liquid ammonia, and the remaining vapor splits into a recycle (back to the loop) and a purge — the purge exists specifically to bleed off the inert argon a single-pass reactor could never consume, which would otherwise concentrate in the recycle forever.

9 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

222 0

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Makeup
Loopmix
Loophx
Qsplit
Feedhx
BED1
Qmix1
BED2
Qmix2
BED3
Chill
SEP
Ammonia
Purgesplit
Purge
Ammonia plant, Ludwigshafen, Germany

Quench-converter ammonia synthesis loop

The multi-bed quench converter BASF first installed in 1942, which displaced the tube-cooled converters before it, running inside a complete 200 bar synthesis loop. Ammonia synthesis is equilibrium-limited and exothermic, so the catalyst wants to run hot for rate and cool for equilibrium, and no single adiabatic bed can do both. The quench converter's answer is mechanical: split the loop gas, send 55% through the interchanger into bed 1 and inject the other 45% as cold shots between the beds, so each bed heats up adiabatically and each quench pulls it back down. What it computes: the sawtooth, 673 → 766 K in bed 1, quenched to 689 K and out at 760 K, quenched to 712 K and out at 766 K; 12.5 mol% ammonia at the converter exit, in the 12-18% band real quench converters deliver, at 20.9% nitrogen conversion per pass; 44.6 mol/s of 97.8% liquid ammonia off the 250 K separator; and argon and methane held at 3.3% and 4.2% in the loop by a 3% purge, with the recycle closed by a Wegstein tear. The acid test is the counterfactual: one adiabatic bed producing that same 12.51 mol% ammonia exit ends at 834.7 K — 562 C, past the sintering limit of promoted-magnetite catalyst — while the three-bed quench converter delivers the identical duty with a 766 K (493 C) peak.

15 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

76 0

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Syngas
MIX
Reactor
Chill
SEP
NH3 Product
Split
Purge
Ammonia synthesis loop, Ludwigshafen, Germany

High-recycle ammonia loop (equation-oriented)

A tight, high-recycle ammonia synthesis loop built to show why a modern simulator solves recycles the way legacy sequential-modular tools can't. Fresh syngas (N₂ + 3H2, with argon inert) mixes with a large recycle, reacts to only ~10% per pass, chills so ammonia condenses out as product, and the unreacted gas recycles — a recycle-to-fresh ratio of ~5:1, with argon building up until a small purge balances it. Run this in Equation-Oriented mode (Solver menu > Mode > Equation-oriented). In the default sequential-modular mode the solver tears the recycle and iterates Wegstein ~78 times to close the loop; the equation-oriented solver instead makes every inter-unit stream a global unknown and closes all ~35 of them in one simultaneous Newton solve — the same simultaneous approach AVEVA SimCentral / gPROMS / IDAES use, and the reason tightly coupled recycles that crawl (or stall) in sequential-modular converge cleanly here.

8 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

224 2

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