Application examples

This document presents the simulations of different absorption heat pump cycles. Two types of absorption heat pump are presented: an absorption heat transformer and an absorption refrigerator. A industrial example is also presented to illustrate the utilization of absorption heat pump.

This example presents the ammonia synthesis process from natural gas. This example includes two simulations: one simulation is dedicated to the entire process and another to the reactor alone to take into account its technological specificities. A pinch analysis of the process is also carried out.

In this example, a bioethanol production unit is presented. Ethanol is produced from biomass by hydrolysis and sugar fermentation. First, the biomass is pre-treated with acid and enzyme to produce sugar. The sugar is then fermented into ethanol. The ethanol produced still contains a significant amount of water, which is removed by using fractional distillation.

This example illustrates the production of biofuel from pure vegetable oil with an alkaline catalyst. The process involves a transesterification reaction that requires using an alcohol (usually methanol) and allows producing biofuel and glycerol from oil.

This example corresponds to the simulation of the well-known Claus process. This process allows the recovery of elemental sulfur from acid gas containing H2S and water, and possibly hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide.

This example presents the simulation of a CO2 capture process from flue gas by absorption using an amine solution. The gas is first cooled in a direct contact cooler with water before to be CO2 impoverished in an absorber (absorption column) using an amine solution. The amine is then regenerated in a desorber (distillation column) to be recycled in the absorber. The desorber gas outlet composed of CO2 and water is then cooled and sent in a flash drum to separate water from CO2. This example especially illustrates the use of the ProSimPlus “Generalized balance” module for make-up amine and make-up water flowrates calculation.

This example presents the simulation of refrigeration machines with transcritical CO2. Two transcritical cycles are presented, a simple cycle and a two-stage cycle. The cycles allow to provide temperatures below 0°C.

This example presents the simulation of a cogeneration plant fueled by natural gas (NG). The objective of the process is to merge the production of usable heat and electricity into a single process that can substantially reduce carbon emissions and energy costs. Electricity is produced through a cascade of turbines while the heat is recovered by heat exchangers.

In this example, a cyclohexane production unit is represented. It is a typical chemical industrial process that includes a reaction section where the product is synthesized followed by a separation section where products and by-products are separated. Particular points detailed in this example are: • The use of a constraint management module in order to reach a specification. • The use of an information stream to split a heat exchanger between a temperature set point and a simple exchanger, in order to avoid a stream recycle.

This example deals with the simulation of a deethanizer. The aim of this column is to recover as much as possible of ethane in the overhead product. Thus, the propane and the heavier lie in the bottoms. The particular point which is detailed is the modeling of the thermosiphon reboiler. This equipment is precisely taken into account by the representation of the downcomer and the riser. The pressure drop balance is computed in a Windows Script module.

This example presents the economic evaluation of a toluene hydrodealkylation process with ProSimPlus. The hydrodealkylation reactor is fed with pre-heated hydrogen and toluene. The products of the reaction (benzene, biphenyl and methane) and the residual reactants are separated by a flash and three separation units. The recycling allows to reinject a part of the residual reactants into the hydrodealkylation reactor. This example especially illustrates the use of the ProSimPlus “Economic evaluation” module on a process including different types of unit operations (reactors, columns, pumps, heat exchangers…).

This example illustrates the simulation of a production unit of ester and glycerin (glycerol) by esterification of vegetable oil. The "Pinch analysis" module is used to perform an energy analysis of the process.

This example illustrates a manufacturing unit of drinks-grade alcohol, (ethanol distillery) with very constraining specifications on purity. The simulation of this process is complex because it involves five distillation columns (two-phase or three-phase) highly inter-connected with many recycles. Moreover the representation of phase equilibria is also particularly complex because of the strong non-ideality of the system: very strict specifications on purity, liquid phase splitting phenomena, multiple azeotropes, etc. The particular point which is detailed in this example is the possibility to define specifications on the output streams of a distillation column or on any multistage separation module in ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the use of an external optimization algorithm in the ProSimPlus simulation environment. The communication interfaces with the external algorithm are detailed along with a short application example.

This example presents the simulation of a frozen potatoes processing plant. A Water Pinch Analysis (WPA) is performed and the different new water networks are simulated to evaluate the reduction of water consumption and waste water of the process.

This example illustrates a gas deacidification of a hydrogen stream with the Purisol process. N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone (NMP) is used as the solvent. The deacidification is done through a contactor and the solvent regeneration needs three successive flashes. The process objective is to highly decrease the CO2 composition of the input gas. NMP make-up is automatically calculated with simple modules. This example is taken from [KOH97] publication which describes main features of this process.

This example mainly illustrates the use of the pipe segment module included in the standard version of ProSimPlus through the modeling of a small gas condensate gathering system consisting of three wells connected to a gas plant via a network of pipelines. It also illustrates the creation of pseudo-compound and the estimation of hypothetical component properties to model C7+ cut. Besides, this example shows how the pressure at the nodes of the gas network can be automatically adjusted when the wellhead rates and output delivery pressure are fixed ("pressure driven" simulation). Finally modeling of wellhead performance curves is used to show how to add features to existing unit operations thanks to "Windows Script" feature allowed by ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates a high purity separation process of an azeotropic mixture (ethanol-water) through heterogeneous azeotropic distillation. This process includes distillation columns. Additionally these rigorous multi-stage separation modules are part of a recycling stream, demonstrating the efficiency of ProSimPlus convergence methods.

This document showcases the use of the “electrolyzer” module that allows to produce hydrogen from the electrolysis of water. It also allows to discover some graphical features of ProSimPlus (change of modules visuals, display of tags on the flowsheet).

This example presents an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) based on coal gasification using ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the possibility to link ProSimPlus to Excel: ProSimPlus loads parameters from an Excel file and exports simulation results to the same Excel file.

This example shows a process of LPG recovery in a gas with a propane refrigeration loop. This process is particularly inter-connected and includes several recycle loops.

This example shows a process of LPG recovery in a natural gas with a propane refrigeration loop. This process is particularly inter-connected and includes several recycling loops. Additionally, beside the implementation of the absorber module and of the refrigeration loop, this process uses a brazed plate-fin heat exchanger. This heat exchanger is modeled using ProSec, ProSim’s CAPE-OPEN compliant unit operation dedicated to the simulation of brazed plate-fin heat exchangers. ProSec allows taking into account the effect of the stacking and of the pressure drop on the enthalpy curves.

This example presents the simulation of two membrane filters: the first one is dealing with a liquid-liquid filtration and the second one with a gas-gas filtration. The main objective of this example is to illustrate the use of membrane filters in the ProSimPlus software.

This example illustrates the synthesis of methanol from a syngas. The syngas can be provided by a gasifier (e.g. “PSPS_E28_EN - IGCC Plant”). The different steps are modeled: syngas compression reaction, flash purification and then final distillation purification of the methanol produced. The synthesis reactor is modelled using Gibbs energy minimization. The particular points which are detailed in this example are the use of a Gibbs reactor, the modeling of the distillation column condenser as an outside unit operation and the use of a “Calculator Switch” to change the thermodynamic model in some part of the process.

This example illustrates a process to purify naphthalene from a mixture containing 14 components in a three columns distillation train. This example mainly focuses on two-phase (vapor-liquid) distillation columns. For each of the three distillation columns, several specifications are set on the output streams, illustrating the way to set "non-standard" specifications in the multi-stage separation modules of ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates a natural gas deacidification with the Selexol process. Selexol, mixture of polyethylene glycol dimethyl ether, is used as the solvent. The deacidification is done through a contactor and the solvent regeneration needs three successive flashes. The process objective is to highly decrease the CO2 composition of the input gas. Selexol make-up is automatically calculated with simple modules. This example is taken from [RAN76] publication which describes main features of this process.

This example illustrates a process to remove water from natural gas using Triethylene Glycol (TEG) as dehydration solvent. The interesting points of this example lie in the use of the “absorption” module for the contactor model and in the representation of two columns connected in series (the TEG regenerator and the TEG stripper) by a single ProSimPlus “stripper” module.

This example presents the optimization of an existing natural gas liquids plant operating balance with ProSimPlus. This example especially illustrates the combined use of the “Economic evaluation” and the “SQP Optimization” modules of ProSimPlus.

This example presents the simulation of the PRICO process for the liquefaction of natural gas with a refrigeration cycle.This process is analyzed with the pinch and exergy analysis.

This example presents the simulation of a methanization process producing biogas. The produced biogas is upgraded and used to generate steam with a boiler.

This example presents two seawater desalination technologies. One is based on distillation and the other one on membrane filtration (with the serial and/or parallel association of membrane filters). The purpose of this example is to present these technologies and compare their performances.

The main interest of this simple example is that it allows a progressive approach to process simulation and its main concepts: components involved, thermodynamic models, unit operations and their corresponding operating parameters, recycle loops, etc. The particular points detailed in this example are the concept of recycling loop and the principles of the simultaneous modular approach used in ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the simulation of a FCCU main fractionator with ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the simulation of a vacuum distillation unit with ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the simulation of a crude oil atmospheric distillation unit with ProSimPlus.

This example illustrates the simulation of a crude oil atmospheric distillation unit with a preflash column with ProSimPlus.

This example presents the simulation of different Rankine cycles powered by geothermal energy. Three types of Rankine cycle are presented: simple cycle, flash cycle and mixed cycle.

This example illustrates a syngas deacidification with the Rectisol process. Methanol is used as the solvent. The deacidification is done through a contactor and the solvent regeneration needs several columns and flashes. The process objective is to refine a syngas of CO2 and H2S in order to have a satisfactory purity in CO2 allowing its storage and a stream of H2S able to be treated in a Claus unit. Methanol make-up is automatically calculated with simple modules. This example is taken from [KOH97] publication which describes main features of this process.

The objective of this example is to simulate a crude oil separation process. This separation process is based on the differences of pressure between the different 3-phase (liquid-liquid-vapor) and 2-phase (liquid-vapor) flashes used. This example makes use of petroleum cuts properties generation which are considered as pseudo-components as well as a specific thermodynamic model for water-hydrocarbon systems.

This example presents the simulation of a power plant with three combined cycles: a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), a gas turbine (GT) and a steam cycle (SC).

The main interest of this example is to show how it is possible to simulate a process integrating steady-state parts and batch parts with ProSim software. (use of the BatchReactor and BatchColumn software in the ProSimPlus simulation environment).