Predicting the Performance of Multistage Separation Processes, Second Edition

Book excerpt: Multistage separation processes are essentially the heart and soul of the petroleum, petrochemical, and chemical industries. They yield products as common as gasoline and plastics and those as specialized as medical-grade pharmaceuticals. Predicting the Performance of Multistage Separation Processes provides chemical engineers with solid information and insights into these processes. It reaches beyond fundamental principles to focus on intuitive understanding and practical interpretation. To that end, it presents numerous examples from a variety of applications, effectively demonstrating the performance of processes under varying conditions and the relationship among the different operating variables. With major advances in computational techniques for solving complex multistage separation equations, a variety of simulation programs have emerged that allow accurate and efficient prediction of multistage separation processes. These are valuable and effective tools, but are often hampered by a lack of understanding of the fundamentals and limitations of prediction techniques. The author addresses these problems and pursues a strategy that decouples the discussion of conceptual analysis and the computational techniques. Although Dr. Khoury presents mathematical methods in detail, he gives special attention to keeping the practical interpretation of the models in focus and emphasizes intuitive understanding. He applies graphical techniques and shortcut methods wherever possible and includes industrial practice heuristics about the ranges of operating variables that will work. With its updates and the addition of more than 100 new applications problems and solutions, Predicting the Performance of Multistage Separation Processes, Second Edition is ideal for a methodical study of separation processes and as a reference for the fundamental principles and shortcuts useful to the working professional.