Chemical plant, available energy analysis

As mentioned earlier, both chemical (catalyst, surfactants, stabilizers) and physical (fluid dynamics, energy dissipation rates, circulation time and so on) factors control the performance of the suspension polymerization reactor. It is first necessary to examine the available experimental data to clearly understand the role of these chemical and physical factors. The available data indicates that the yield of usable polymer beads in laboratory scale reactor is more than 85%. Laboratory experiments were then planned to examine the sensitivity of the yield to various parameters of the polymerization recipe under the same hydrodynamic conditions. These experiments showed that the yield is relatively insensitive to small deviations in the chemical recipe. Analysis of the available data on pilot and plant scale indicated a progressive decrease in the yield of usable polymer beads from laboratory to pilot to plant scale. This analysis and some indirect evidence suggested that it may be possible to re-design the plant-scale reactor hardware to generate better fluid dynamics and mixing to increase the yield of particles in the desired size range. 

On the other hand, for the analysis of a chemical plant (e.g.,12), the variations of ambient conditions may be negligible. If the largest contributions to the available energies of materials are their chemical availabilities (12,13), then variations of Tq may be inconsequential. In fact, the usage of Tq = 77°F = 25°C is often justifiable—for the sake of the convenience of thermochemical property calculations—even if the average outdoor temperature is somewhat different. 

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