Design For Multi-Purpose Plants - A Special Problem

3 Design For Multi-Purpose Plants - A Special Problem 

The procedure described in the previous section is only applicable, if the reaction vessel considered is used for just one single process. In this case all necessary substance and system data can be obtained experimentally at a reasonable expense. In the fine chemicals and pharmaceutical industry, however, multipurpose plants are preferred. They are required in order to be able to respond adequately to the fast changing development activities and the continuously changing mass demands. During project engineering activities for such a plant the problem may arise that several hundred different syntheses are expected to be performed on this plant, of which may be half are known chemically due to current activities. 

As escalating process deviations can never be fully excluded, these reaction vessels also have to be equipped with emergency relief devices. The experimental characterization of all processes, even of the known ones, is not possible in the extent necessary for vent design. 

In the following a procedure is presented which leads a way out of this problem and allows the necessary design of multi-purpose plants without an exact knowledge of the chemistry to be performed later on this plant. 

It must be emphasized again at this point that it is a procedure which is going to be presented here. The data used are only sample data and must specifically be defined for each company in case of application. 

---