Alessandro Di Pretoro - Non-conventional Unit Operations: Solving Practical Issues

More information about this subseries at http://www.springer.com/series/11159 http://www.polimi.it

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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This volume is the culmination of the authors collaboration aimed to provide a reference book for Chemical Plants II course, addressed to the M.Sc. Chemical Engineering students at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering Giulio Natta.

It was conceived as a quick and complete reference compendium of several non-conventional unit operations. This topic is discussed in specific optional courses but it is seldom explained during traditional lectures, although a chemical engineer often needs to deal with non-conventional unit operations during his career. Actual scientific literature includes excellent volumes which provide in-depth analysis of every single unit operations, but they require an extensive study to find the pursued information, an effort which could be useful only for highly specialized and sectoral applications. The first reason to write this book was indeed to meet the chemical engineering students need for effectively achieving a fundamental knowledge of a wide range of non-conventional processes, without preventing further studies if required.

The text provides both methodologies and numerical applications for non-conventional unit operations design. Based on a proposed case study, process model equations are extrapolated and followed by the numerical solution in order to immediately test the acquired skills on an application example. At the end of certain chapter, a C++ code implementation is provided in order to solve the ODE or nonlinear equations system by mean of the ad hoc BzzMath library.The secondary objective of this book is therefore to create a connection between the modeling problem and its computational solution, regardless of the coding language, that is the basic concept of Computer Aided Process Engineering.

The first part deals with design, comparison, and optimization of heating and cooling operations, different from simple heat exchange, which are widely used both in industrial and daily life settings.

The second and larger part is a quick and effective overview of several frequently used non-conventional separation processes, which are mainly referred to heterogeneous phases and include concentration, filtration, drying, solid-fluid separation, and crystallization. Each chapter is independent from the others, except for some highlighted references, which are not essential for the understanding. Therefore, topics can be studied in individual chapters or by thematic groups.

The most used tool for the numerical solution of simple problem is Microsoft Excel, even if every other equivalent software can be suitable as well. The same remark holds true for the programming codes: they are written in C++, a widespread programming language, which is the most commonly used for process simulators. Nevertheless, the code transposition from C++ to any other programming language (e.g., Python, Fortran, Matlab, etc.) requires relatively poor efforts, so the same model equations can be solved by mean of every other language, given that a suitable ODEs and nonlinear equations system solver is available.

We wish finally to acknowledge the scientific and technical heritage bequeathed us by Prof. Sauro Pierucci, former professor of this course and endless source of inspiration. We would like to thank as well Prof. Guido Buzzi-Ferraris for all his teachings and nonetheless for his remarkable hard work in creating the BzzMath C++ library.