Equipment design fractionators

More shortcut design methods and rules of thumb have been developed for fractionation than probably any other unit operation. For example the paper reprinted in Appendix 5 on development of shortcut equipment design methods contains 18 references for fractionation shortcut methods out of 37 total. Both the process and mechanical aspects of fractionation design have useful rules of thumb. Many of the mechanical design rules of thumb become included in checklists of do s and don ts. 

Other examples of this type of program are those for equipment design— for instance, the detailed design of heat exchangers or fractionating columns. 

The main commercial fractionation process for milk fat is the Tirtiaux process, followed by the De Smet process. There are also some proprietary variations of the dry fractionation process which enable the production of various milk fat fractions. The characteristics of the fractions obtained are affected by many factors, including the equipment design, the associated process, the initial temperature of the molten fat, the crystallization conditions (e.g., degree of initial supercooling), the rate of subsequent cooling and agitation after crystallization commences, the final temperature of fractionation and the method used to separate the fractions. 

An enormous amount of work has gone into the study of contacting devices, and the literature on their performance characteristics is extensive. Most of the work dealing with laiger equipment has been based on plant observations, but a significant portion of it has been based on controlled experiments in commercial-scale equipment by Fractionation Research, Inc. (FRI). The methods for analysis and design of distillation columns, present in this section, are based on a combination of fundamental research papers, results released by FRI, and many repotted plant tests. 

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