Materials and Energy Balances

Materials and Energy Balances was developed by Ray E. Desroisiers, of the Chemical Engineering Department of Texas Tech University, for several courses in chemical processing.

This tutorial:

• Explains what a degree-of-freedom (DF) analysis is and how to apply the technique to chemical process flowsheets.

• Teaches you how to use the results of a DF analysis to simplify the task of solving the material and energy balances for a flowsheet.

• Illustrates how to efficiently organize the computation of material and energy balances in the context of a Mathcad document.

Throughout this Electronic Book the focus is on those issues which arise in the analysis of steady-state process flowsheets. Only material that is directly relevant to this issue is discussed.

The strong emphasis placed on the degree-of-freedom (DF) analysis is justified by the result: students are able to attack complex flowsheets without having to resort exclusively to 'intuition.' The logic of the DF analysis enables students to plan their work and avoid investing hours of computation on a strategy doomed to failure.

This new medium of instruction is effective because it combines a powerful computational tool with the subject being presented. The stultifying tedium of solving simultaneous and/or nonlinear equations is eliminated. Students can focus on formulating valid sets of equations.