University Of North Carolina At Greensboro Operations And Supply Chain Management Assignment Help - the production

Question - In the production of a bean oil beans containing 13.0 wt% oil and 87.0% solids are ground and fed to
a stirred tank (the extractor) along with a recycled stream of liquid n-hexane. The feed ratio is 3kg
hexane/kg beans. The ground beans are suspended in the liquid, and essentially all of the oil in the
beans is extracted into the hexane. The extractor effluent passes to a filter. The filter cake contains
75.0 wt% bean solids and the balance bean oil and hexane, the latter two in the same ratio in which
they emerge from the extractor. The filter cake is discarded and the liquid filtrate is fed to a heated
evaporator in which the hexane is vaporized and the oil remains as a liquid. The oil is stored in drums
and shipped. The hexane vap ...Read More or is subsequently cooled and condensed, and the liquid hexane
condensate is recycled to the extractor.
(a) Draw and label a flowchart of the process, do the degree-of-freedom analysis, and write in an
efficient order the equations you would solve to determine all unknown stream variables, circling the
variables for which you would solve.
(b) Calculate the yield of bean oil product (kg oil/kg beans fed), the required fresh hexane feed (kg
C6H14/kg beans fed), and the recycle to fresh feed ratio (kg hexane recycled/kg fresh feed).
(c) It has been suggested that a hear exchanger might be added to the process. This process unit
would consist of a bundle of parallel metal tubes contained in an outer shell. The liquid filtrate would
pass from the filter through the inside of the tubes and then go on to the evaporator. The hot hexane
vapor on its way from the evaporator to the extractor would flow through the shell, passing over the
outside of the tubes and heating the filtrate. How might the inclusion of this unit lead to a reduction in
the operating cost of the process?
(d) Suggest additional steps that might improve the processeconomics. ...Read Less

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