TABLE OF CONTENTS A plant design consists of words, numbers, and pictures. An engineer thinks in terms of sketches and drawings that are his or her "pictures." To solve a material balance problem, the engineer will start with a block to represent the equipment and then will show the entering and leaving streams with their amounts and properties. When asked to describe a process, an engineer will begin to sketch equipment, show how it is interconnected, and show the process flows and operating conditions.
Such sketches develop into flow sheets, which are more elaborate diagrammatic representations of the equipment, the sequence of operations, and the expected performance of a proposed plant or the actual performance of an already operating one. For clarity and to meet the needs of the various persons engaged in design, cost estimating, purchasing, fabrication, operation, maintenance, and management, several different kinds of flowsheets are necessary. Four of the main kinds will be described and illustrated.
At an early stage or to provide an overview of a complex process or plant, a drawing is made with rectangular blocks to represent individual processes or groups of operations, together with quantities and other pertinent properties of key streams between the blocks and into and from the process as a whole. Such block flowsheets are made at the beginning of a process design for orientation purposes or later as a summary of the material balance of the process. For example, the coal carbonization process of Figure 2.1 starts with...
