Steam cracking Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 3 validated, solved Steam cracking simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethane, ethylene, h2, n_heptane, methane, propylene. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: PENG-ROBINSON.
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).
10 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
232 0
View & openNaphtha 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.
30 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
244 2
View & openElectrically heated ethane cracker (Linde/BASF/SABIC STARBRIDGE concept)
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.
11 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
189 1
View & open