Before you start

This course puts the pieces together into a plant: separating the products, drawing the flowsheet, controlling it, keeping it safe and checking it pays. It recaps what it uses from the earlier courses here, so you can start with it.

A liquid's vapor pressure rises with temperature, and it boils when that equals the pressure around it. In a mixture, Raoult's law gives each liquid's share of the vapor pressure: pᵢ = xᵢ × Pᵢ*, with xᵢ its mole fraction in the liquid. The vapor is richer in the more volatile liquid, the one with the higher vapor pressure.

Mass balances: at steady state, in = out for every substance (reactions add generation and consumption). A recycle sends unreacted feed back to the reactor; a purge bleeds off things that would otherwise build up.

Reactors convert feed to product, with some conversion per pass and some selectivity to the wanted product. Exothermic reactions need cooling, and losing it can cause a runaway. Heat exchangers move heat from hot streams to cold ones, sized by q = U × A × ΔT.

Money: capital cost is what you spend once to build the plant; operating cost is what you spend every year to run it (raw materials, energy, people, maintenance).