TAME synthesis via reactive distillation — a PENG-ROBINSON process flowsheet
Tert-Amyl Methyl Ether (TAME) is etherified from a cracked C₅ cut's reactive isoamylenes (2-methyl-1-butene / 2-methyl-2-butene) and methanol over the reactive stages of a column, pulling unreacted light C5s overhead while methanol-free TAME leaves the bottoms — reaction and separation in one shell, the same reactive-distillation pattern as the DME etherification example. The distillate draws 53% of the feed: etherification turns two molecules into one, so at 90% conversion the column has 6.21 mol/s to send out, of which the light C5s and unreacted methanol are 4.32. Luyben, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2005, 44, 5715.
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- Rigorous PENG-ROBINSON thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 1 unit operations modeled: RD.
- Focus areas: Reactive distillation, Etherification, C5 upgrading.
- Thermodynamics
- PENG-ROBINSON
- Components
- 2_methyl_1_butene, methanol, tame, n_pentane
- Unit operations
- RD
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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("tame-reactive-distillation")
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
DME synthesis via reactive distillation
Methanol dehydrates to dimethyl ether over the reactive stages of a column — reaction and separation in one shell, pulling DME overhead while unconverted methanol and water leave the bottoms (Peng-Robinson EoS avoids the missing UNIFAC group-decomposition for ethers that blocks this under an activity-coefficient package). The conversion is 78%, not 80%: with the distillate drawing 40% of the feed, an 80% conversion makes exactly the 4 mol/s of DME the distillate takes, so it would demand a perfectly pure DME overhead and DME-free bottoms, a split no finite column makes. The stages near the condenser hold almost no methanol, so the reaction runs where the methanol is, on the feed and stripping trays.
Methyl acetate esterification via reactive distillation
Acetic acid and methanol esterify over the reactive stages of a column into methyl acetate and water — a genuine quadruple-azeotrope system where reactive distillation intensifies what would otherwise need several conventional columns. Reactive Distillation Design and Control, Luyben & Yu, Wiley (2006), pp. 147-164.
Butyl acetate synthesis via reactive distillation
Methyl acetate transesterifies with n-butanol over the reactive stages of a column into butyl acetate (a common paint/coatings solvent) and methanol, which is pulled overhead as it forms while high-boiling butyl acetate collects in the bottoms. The light reactant (methyl acetate) enters low in the reactive zone and rises through it, the heavy one (n-butanol) enters high and falls through it, so the two meet on the trays between: fed the other way round each leaves by its nearer end before it meets the other, and the column converts under a third of the methyl acetate. Luyben et al., Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2011, 50, 1247.
LNG front end and storage: guard beds, tank boil-off, driver limit
The parts of a 5.2 Mtpa LNG train that are not the cold box, and the four questions they answer that no bulk unit can — at real capacity, so the vessel sizes and duties are ones an engineer can check against their own plant. Guard beds: a sulfur-carbon bed takes mercury from 200 to 0.01 µg/Nm³ — the brazed-aluminium limit, because mercury attacks the plate-fin cold box by liquid-metal embrittlement — on a 4.8 m x 6.6 m bed with 4.2 years of life from a capacity balance — inside the 3-5 year window these non-regenerable beds are actually replaced on, which is what a turnaround plan needs. A 4A molecular sieve then dries the gas to 0.1 ppmv, the only route to a cryogenic water spec (a glycol contactor tops out near a −30 °C dew point), on a 4.9 m x 5.1 m bed running a 13.8 h cycle for 1.3 MW of regeneration duty. Storage: the LNG goes to a tank whose boil-off rate comes from a 0.05%/day guarantee but whose boil-off composition comes from a real equilibrium flash — and that is the interesting part, because the vapour leaves at ~11 mol% nitrogen against 1.1% in the feed. Nitrogen and methane are far more volatile at 113 K, so the boil-off is light and the stored liquid weathers heavier: nobody specified that, the flash found it. Recondensing: the boil-off goes back into the send-out LNG rather than to a flare, and the unit reports the LNG:BOG ratio (1999) against the minimum the energy balance demands (3.8), which is the constraint a terminal is actually operated against. The driver: a gas turbine burning plant fuel gas, rated 97.5 MW at ISO conditions, delivers only 84.5 MW at 35 °C — 5.5 MW short of its 90 MW refrigeration load, and flagged as such. That derate is computed from two physical effects (a fixed-geometry compressor swallows a fixed volume so mass flow follows air density, and hotter air costs more to compress), not from a vendor curve, and it comes out at 0.66%/K — mid-band for industrial machines. It is why a tropical LNG train makes less product in summer.
Gas-condensate LNG train: condensate, LPG and LNG
The LNG plant that is also a liquids plant, at real capacity: this is one 4.4 Mtpa train (a two-train plant is two of these), not a scaled-down sketch. A condensate-rich field arrives by trunkline as a two-phase stream: the slug catcher drops ~20 mol% of it out as raw condensate before a single molecule reaches the cold end, and the plant then runs two trains side by side off one feed. Liquids: the raw condensate is let down to an MP flash that strips the dissolved methane (without it the stabilizer's shortcut total condenser tries to condense methane at 8 bar, which is not a real stabilizer overhead), then stabilized to a C₅/C₆ product. Gas: sweetened and dried, chilled to 245 K to knock out an NGL cut, and the NGL demethanized and split by a deethanizer / depropanizer / debutanizer sequence into commercial propane (~98 mol%) and butane (~98 mol%) LPG plus a natural-gasoline bottoms. LNG: the lean gas goes to the same APCI C3MR cold end as the 'c3mr-lng-liquefaction' showcase — propane precool, mixed-refrigerant MCHE to 120 K, JT letdown to a 1.5 bar end-flash drum. Five sold products come out of one flowsheet, each a stream the solver computed. Watch the end-flash boil-off: it leaves at ~13 mol% nitrogen against 1 mol% in the feed, because the flash drum is where an LNG train actually rejects its nitrogen — nobody specified that, the flash found it. Dehydration is the real molecular-sieve bed, not a stand-in: a 4A sieve sized by length-of-unused-bed, which is what actually takes the gas to the <=0.1 ppmv the cold box needs — 95 t of sieve on a 5.5 x 5.5 m bed, a 17.5 h cycle and 1.4 MW of regeneration duty, with 0.47 bar of Ergun pressure drop. The AGRU spec is checked against the physics rather than assumed: 99.9% CO₂ removal leaves 33 ppmv, and at the coldest point in the train (115.9 K) the solid-CO₂ solubility limit is 232 ppmv on the measured-data basis — a 7x margin, so the sweetening spec demonstrably clears freeze-out instead of merely looking tight.
Deep ethane recovery with propane-refrigerated feed chilling
Associated gas is chilled by an external propane refrigeration package before a demethanizer recovers ethane and heavier as NGL bottoms from a methane-rich residue gas overhead — the cryogenic-chilling role Ortloff's CCS/GSP processes play ahead of the turboexpander in a real deep-ethane-recovery plant. The mechanical refrigeration loop itself (compressor/condenser/valve) isn't separately modeled here; the chiller's duty is represented directly as the feed's cooled outlet temperature (the same honest-simplification pattern used for LNG cold-box examples elsewhere in this library).