Team 7: Engineering an Alternate Route to Styrene

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Team 7Engineering an Alternate Route to Styrene
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Larae Baker
Jonathan Bush
Maxine Bent
Adam Jones
Michael Heslinga
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Outline

• Re-introduction
• Feasibility
• Struggles
• Design Norms
• Changes

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Brief (re-)Introduction

• Design a styrene plant on a computer simulator
• Production capacity of 2 billion pounds of
  styrene per year 17 of current US market
• Currently sold at 0.70/lb
• New chemical process
• Dow Chemical and Snamprogetti

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PFD
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Feasibility

• Chemical
• Patents
• Separations
• Current industry practices
• Financial
• Capital Investment and Operating Cost
• Less costly raw materials
• No Prototype

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Struggles

• Proprietary Information
• Literature
• Contact at Dow Chemical
• Reaction Kinetics
• Catalyst Design
• Design norms

Four to six weeks in the lab can save you an hour
in the library
- G.C. Quarderer
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Design Norms

• Justice and Caring
• Where to build a plant
• NIMBY
• Environmental Stewardship
• Possible recycling technology in progress
• Use energy/raw material wisely
• How to handle waste
• Creating something people need (at a lower cost)

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Video found by Bob DeKrackerwww.americanchemistry
.org
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Changes since Last Presentation

• No lab work
• Catalyst
• Reagents
• Equipment
• Solution
• Develop lab experiments
• Using heuristics

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Where to go from here?

• Further Research
• Base Case Simulation
• Equipment Design
• Reactor - Alkylation
• Reactor - Dehydrogenation
• Separations Equipment
• Economic Optimization

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THANKS FOR LISTENING!QUESTIONS?