Page 142 - Plant design and economics for chemical engineers

COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN 117

PROCESS-EQUIPMENT-DESIGN PROGRAMS
A few examples of the many programs available for the design of chemical-pro-
cess equipment are given here. Dozens of programs have been published.?
Piping network design programs have been reviewed.$
CACHE has PC programs available for the following operations: slurry
flow in pipes, supercriticial fluid extraction, gas absorption with chemical
reaction, design of flash vessels and distillation towers, heterogeneous reaction
kinetics, and CSTR dynamics and stability. Also available from CACHE are
instructional modules for binary distillation, material balances, and flow-sheet
drawing. CACHE has the programs THEN and TARGET II that are useful in
the design of heat-exchange networks.

PROPERTY DATA PROGRAMS
The property program developed by the Design Institute for Physical Properties
of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, known as DIPPR, is widely
known and used. The PC version of DIPPR contains 26 constant and 13
temperature-dependent, pure-component properties for 766 common industrial
chemicals.
There are at least 20 physical property databases commercially available as
on-line data services&! Five of the databases listed include vapor-liquid-equi-
librium calculations for mixtures.
COADE/Chemstations, Inc. provides PREDICTTM and IS1 Software
offers ChemSmartTM for property estimation on personal computers.
Chemical process flow-sheeting programs include property data and pre-
diction methods for pure components and mixtures. Property data can be
retrieved from these programs for use in flow-sheeting, or such a program can
be used as a property database without using the flow-sheeting capability.
Flow-sheeting programs are discussed later in this chapter.

PROCESS SYNTHESIS
The first step in plant design is to define a process, namely the chemical and
physical processing steps to convert raw materials into desired products. The
number of choices and combinations of unit operations, reactor designs, and
ancillary processes that might be used for even a simple process can be quite

TD. J. Deutsch, ed., “Microcomputer Programs for Chemical Engineers,” Vols. 1 and 2, McGraw-Hill
Book Company, New York, 1984 and 1987.
$Piping Software Relieves Headaches, Chem. Eng., 95(9):145-146 (June 20, 1988).
$A Wealth of Information Online, Chew. Eng., 96(6):112-127 (June, 1989), describes these property
databases as well as databases on environmental protection, safety and health, and patents.