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Preface

An increased use of computational resources by engineers has greatly expedited the design of equipment and process plants in refining, and the chemical process industries. In addition, the availability of commercial and open source process simulation packages, and spreadsheets has drastically reduced the requirement of programming with high-level languages, such as BASIC, C, C++, COBOL, Java, FORTRAN and Pascal. Situations may arise where a simulation package is not readily available, too expensive or of a limited scope, in this case, hands-on tools; e.g. spreadsheets could be used to review other alternatives or develop specific programs. Furthermore, the simulation packages can be integrated with spreadsheets to enlarge their scope to equipment and process design due to the infrastructure they provide on component databases, physical property estimations and unit operations.

A text-book, including the theory with equations, tables, and figures and the use of advanced tools is not readily available to the process designer. Our aim in preparing this text is to present theory, along with Excel spreadsheet and UniSim Design software programs for solving a wide range of design problems. The book will, therefore, benefit chemical/process engineers, students, technologists and practitioners in the petroleum, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, biochemical and fine chemical industries. The structured approaches are provided that can be used to solve a wide range of process engineering problems and thus analyze and simulate process equipment regularly.

The process design concepts, guidelines; codes and standards are clearly important, and several excellent books and references are available to address these issues and will be cited in the book where applicable. However, these two volume-sets are unique in that to date no textbook on chemical process design and simulation has been published, which provides adequate information (theory, equations, figures, tables and programs) to enable the reader to perform robust calculations using Excel spreadsheet - UniSim Design software program. The better use of these tools in the special format shapes the core of the book as:

 – Microsoft Excel® is part of the Microsoft Office. It is widely recognized as the most versatile spreadsheet for problem solving, which enables a chemical engineer to make computation and visualizations in an easiest way possible. Process engineers can use Excel spreadsheet for equipment and process design, modeling, simulation and optimization. Data bases and pivot tables can be easily designed with Excel spreadsheet to ease making calculations, understanding technical reports, and preparing charts and figures.

 – The new improved UniSim R480 Design of Honeywell, is a smart and intuitive software; it creates thermodynamics and unit operation steady-state and dynamic models. Process simulation is a tool used to design a new process, an existing process or debottleneck, monitor process conditions, troubleshoot current operations to compare theoretical results, optimize process conditions for enhanced throughput, and to reduce energy yields, and emissions.

The contents of this book have been formed over many years through the concentrated research and industrial efforts of the authors. Furthermore, to assist the user and to demonstrate the validity of the methods, worked examples and case studies of practical relevance using the Excel spreadsheet and UniSim Design software programs are provided throughout the text, and the source files are provided at the publisher website. In this way, the students, and engineers can save time by using hands-on tools to ease the calculation and concentrate in understanding the fundamentals of the phenomena occurring in the process design sequences. These two volumes are fully extended version of the original title: Fortran Programs for Chemical Process Design, Analysis and Simulation by A. Kayode Coker. In these volumes, we have provided examples in both Imperial and SI units, but we have intentionally kept most examples in Imperial units based on the following reasons:

1 a) All problems solved in UniSim Design can be easily converted to any units of measurement and it makes no difference which unit is used.

2 b) The use of both units is very useful from instructional viewpoint as students need to have some sort of practice with both units as the Imperial unit is still used in some countries.

However, since all problems are carefully solved in Excel, the conversion is then easy, and we have also provided a conversion table to assist readers in their calculations.

The book is primarily intended to serve senior students, early career engineers, university professors and practitioners, especially in the process, chemical, petrochemical, biochemical, mechanical, mining and metallurgical industries. However, other engineers, consultants, technicians and scientists concerned with various aspects of industrial design, and scale-up may also find it useful. It can be considered as a textbook to process design for senior and graduate students as well as a hands-on document for engineers at the entry level and practitioners. The content of this book can also be taught in intensive workshops in process industries.