B48BA

Tutorial 2 Mass balance

1. A continuous distillation unit receives a feed of 500 kmol/h containing 98% water and 2% ethanol. This is fractionated into two streams, the "tops" giving 96% ethanol and the "bottoms" giving 99.33% water. All percentages are molar. Find the product stream flow rates.

2. A process stream containing 20% hexane and 80% octane is fractionated into two streams in a distillation column. The top stream contains 50% hexane. The bottom stream, which contains 90% octane, passes to a second distillation column where it is again split into two product streams. The bottom stream from the second column contains 99% octane and has a flow of 60% of the feed to the first column. All percentages are molar. Calculate all unknown flow rates and concentrations for a feed to the first column of a) 100 kmol/h b) 2500 kmol/h.

3. A lager concentrate containing 2.2%w/w ethanol is diluted with water in a continuous mixing process to produce a "low alcohol" beer containing 0.8% w/w ethanol. What flow of water is required to produce 164 kg (approx. one barrel) every minute?

4. The feed of 1.5 t/h to a continuous distillation column comprises 50% butane, 30% pentane and 20% hexane. The top product consists of 55% of the feed and contains 90% butane while the bottom product contains 42% hexane. All percentages are on a weight basis. MWs: butane = 58 pentane = 72 hexane = 86.

Calculate the flows and concentrations of all streams a) on a weight basis b) on a molar basis.

5. Consider the below figure. The only components are ethanol and water. The streams are numbered from 1 to 7. The flow rates and mass fraction of water ( xw) in stream 1, 2, and 6 are known. Stream 3 splits 50:50 w/w to give streams 4 and 5. Calculate the rate of all other flows and their compositions.

300 kg h-1 xw=0.2 2

1

100 kg h-1 xw=0 6

3 4 5

1200 kg h-1 xw=0.5

Stage 1

Stage 2

This has been discussed in the previous lecture.

6. Silica microbeads have many applications in biotechnology and separation processes. Given that a silica microbead sample has a diameter of 20 microns (m) and the density of silica is 1.0 g cm -3 (i) Calculate the mass (in kg) and the surface area (in m2) of ONE silica microbead. Hence, calculate the specific surface area (surface area per unit mass) in m2 g-1. Consider all microbeads in the sample are identical and are perfect spheres in shape. (ii) For a sample of silica nanoparticles with a diameter of 20 nm instead of microbeads, calculate the mass (in kg), the surface area (in m2), and the specific surface area (in m2 g-1) of ONE silica nanoparticle. Consider all nanoparticles are identical and are perfect spheres.