Optimal Design of Separations for Pilot Plants and Laboratory Bench Units

Separations for pilot plants and laboratory bench units typically will not scale directly to commercial. Attempts to reproduce the actual extent of separation targeted for commercial operation may lead to unnecessarily large and expensive pilot or demonstration units. It is important to design research and development units which can provide target recycle compositions to test integrated process chemistry, and to provide separation data for use in design of commercial units. This seminar will present some examples of pilot and bench units used in design of commercial separations via distillation, liquid extraction, adsorption and ion exchange, and crystallization, with emphasis on use of shortcut methods augmented by numerical modeling.