Wet air oxidation of phenolic wastewater — a PENG-ROBINSON process flowsheet
Liquid-phase oxidation of dissolved organics in wastewater by dissolved O2 at elevated temperature/pressure (kept liquid, not flashed to steam) -- a real, widely licensed generic technology (Zimpro and equivalents), not Linde-proprietary IP, so it's built directly from the real, exactly mass-balanced combustion reaction of a standard WAO test/design compound: phenol (C6H5OH + 7 O2 -> 6 CO2 + 3 H2O). Phenol is the compound most WAO literature uses as the reference organic for design/kinetic studies, not an arbitrary choice. Honesty note: the 95% phenol destruction used here is representative of published WAO performance at adequate severity, not a fitted rate law -- there is no cited kinetic model in this codebase for phenol WAO, so (matching the fixed-conversion-reactor posture used throughout this codebase when kinetics aren't available) this is a fixed-conversion reactor, not an Arrhenius rate expression.
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- Rigorous PENG-ROBINSON thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 4 unit operations modeled: 2× COOL, MIX, WAO Reactor, Offgas SEP.
- Focus areas: Wet air oxidation, Wastewater treatment, Phenol, Liquid-phase oxidation.
- Thermodynamics
- PENG-ROBINSON
- Components
- phenol, oxygen, water, co2
- Unit operations
- 2× COOLMIXWAO ReactorOffgas SEP
Opens in a new tab, loaded straight into the app — no setup.
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("wet-air-oxidation")
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
Phenol + acetone via the Hock process (cumene peroxidation)
The route that makes ~95% of the world's phenol -- and co-produces acetone, the classic two-products-from-one-feed economics. It completes the cumene story: the existing cumene-synthesis example makes cumene from benzene + propylene; this oxidizes it onward. Two atom-balanced steps: air peroxidation (cumene + O2 -> cumene hydroperoxide, CHP) at low per-pass conversion, then acid-catalyzed cleavage (CHP -> phenol + acetone, near-complete). The spent air is vented, and the crude is separated by boiling point (acetone 56 C < cumene 152 C < phenol 182 C < CHP): high-purity phenol, crude acetone as the co-product, and unreacted cumene recovered for recycle. HONEST SCOPE: rigorous atom-balanced reaction stoichiometry; cumene hydroperoxide is a databank pseudo-component (no CoolProp entry) flashed under Peng-Robinson. The purification is spec-based component-split separators (the Aspen 'Sep'-block technique), not rigorous columns. The acetone product comes out ~98% because residual dissolved air (O2/N2) reports overhead with it -- a real plant adds a light-ends/degassing column for polymer-grade acetone; phenol comes out essentially pure. Recovered cumene is shown as an open recycle stream.
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.
Ethanol–water distillation
An 8-stage column concentrating ethanol overhead toward the azeotrope (the headline demo).