Steam economy Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 2 validated, solved Steam economy simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: water, nacl, ethylene, oxygen, ethylene_oxide, co2. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: BRINE, PENG-ROBINSON.
Triple-effect brine evaporator (forward feed)
The classic multiple-effect evaporator, as a standalone drop-in template: a 6 wt% NaCl brine concentrated in three forward-feed effects down a pressure cascade (1.0 → 0.70 → 0.45 bar), where each effect's vapour boil-off is the heating steam for the next. Live 350 kPa steam drives only the first effect; the model reports the resulting steam economy, the per-effect boiling temperatures, and the concentrated liquor. Runs on the brine electrolyte package, so the boiling-point elevation is a real function of the salt as the liquor concentrates rather than an assumed offset.
10 unit ops • BRINE
142 0
View & openEthylene glycol plant: closed water loop + multi-effect evaporator dehydration
The water-integrated evolution of the fiber-grade MEG plant. Two changes turn the once-through EO/glycol chain into a real, water-economical process: (1) the recovered process water is RECYCLED back to the hydration reactors through a purge splitter. A pure recycle is inventory-singular (reactors are keyed on the shrinking EO pool, so water consumption is fixed regardless of how much water circulates), so an 8% purge pins the loop and makes it well-posed, cutting fresh water makeup from 10 to ~1.75 mol/s (a >80% reduction). (2) The bulk dehydration is done by a genuine TWO-EFFECT EVAPORATOR TRAIN (forward-feed, real steam economy: effect 1's low-temperature vapor is the heating steam for effect 2) doing rigorous (P,H)-flash water removal, rather than a single spec-based split. The recycle converges through the solver's Wegstein tearing (~15 outer passes) and MEG still comes out fiber-grade (>=99.9%). HONEST SCOPE: the reaction chemistry is rigorous stoichiometry (real atom balances, ~90/9/1 selectivity) and the evaporators are real energy-balanced flash effects — but flash evaporation CANNOT reach glycol dryness without slipping glycol into the overhead vapor (MEG has a real vapor pressure at 90 C), so the evaporators run cool and only pre-concentrate. An overhead knockout returns the ~1-2% slipped glycol to the product (no yield loss), and a final vacuum-refining polish (still a spec-based split, representing the refluxed dehydration column a flash cannot replicate) removes the last water. This mirrors a real MEG plant's multi-effect-evaporator + vacuum-refining dehydration section. The product columns remain spec-based (a converged 99.9% fiber-grade MEG column is not tractable under Peng-Robinson here — the MEG/DEG relative volatility is too narrow for the wide-boiling MESH path).
32 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
225 4
View & open