Calculation of Heat Losses from a system

when you are working in the field of biotechnology you need to deal with several systems such as fementor,distillation tower,incubator,autoclave ,and so on. 

in this regard i towering figure which always warn you is the amount of energy fed to system and the energy coming out of your system as well. and here you may take care of the beneficiary of the energy.

In this post the i want to go though this hypothesis that says: the input heat to a system has always a certain amount of losses .And meanwhile i will generally describe how the heat loss amount from a system can be calculated.  

So consider a distillation tower .how to determine the heat losses from a distillation tower?  

 A distillation tower (Distillation column) is a collection of equipment which provides us a high concentration of liquid from a low concentration liquid by heating the liquid mixture .in the other word, Distillation is the procedure of separating a certain liquids from a liquid mixture base of differences in their tendency to vaporize (Volatility).in the distillation process we have not any chemical reaction and actually the separation of liquids will be done physically.  

In a typical distillation tower we have:

A tank: it is containing the mixture which is going to be separated (in our case containing Ethanol and water

Fractionating column: comprising platforms, known as trays, which refluxing distillate inside the column, and runs back down into the liquid below. 

Boiler: the boiler is producing steam this steam provides the necessary heat to boil the liquid   . In this case the steam coming from boiler comes through a hose, and divides to two paths:

One line of the Steam heats the ethanol coming from tank

another line of steam heats the reflux liquid mixture draining from fractionating column. The role of this steam is like a motor for distillation tower

A temperature menu: that shows the temperature of different parts of distillation tower 

. 

Control panel: to switch the tower On and shut it down and also adjust the effective elements.

Valves, Pumps, hoses, pipes, Pressure and temperature gauges. 

In this system the low concentration ethanol comes from the tank and get warm by  

steam which is produced by boiler .but we should note that the steam has no direct contact with ethanol and only by heat conduction through the glass the heat transfer will be done.

The liquid ethanol will evaporate and starts to go up the column .we have 10 trays in 

 the column. Vapour goes up and condensed ethanol (liquid) steps down (drop down). Here we have exchange between liquid phases and vapour phase. Ethanol concentration in the vapour is higher in the higher trays.

On the top of the column there is a condenser  that condenses the ethanol that is now pure.  

There are five places which you should take the samples:  

Distillate D  

Feed  F  

Waste W  

Steam From Boiler  

Cooling Water    

In order to calculate the heat loss, you should use the Heat Balance formula: 

IN=OUT 

And it means that the heat entered to the system should be equal to the heat coming out of the system.  

Now we should start to calculate the Energy flow for each five samples. 

after defining the energy flow for each sample you should put them in the main energy balance equation then you can obtain the energy which you have lost from your system

New requirement shakes EU's Renewable Energy Directive

New requirement shakes EU's Renewable Energy Directive

18th September, 2008

MEPs on the industry committee of the European Parliament have voted to keep a proposed target for all road transport to include 10% of renewable fuels by 2020, as outlined in the Renewable Energy Directive.

However, the target has been given a new requirement for 40% of those renewable fuels to come from either second generation biofuels, electricity or hydrogen.

MEPs also voted to support an amendment to the proposed Renewable Energy Directive to include an interim target of 5% renewable fuels within road transport by 2015.

For this interim target, 20% of the renewable fuels, 1% of total fuels, would have to come from second generation biofuels, electricity or hydrogen.

'If this decision is confirmed in the forthcoming plenary vote, it will strongly affect the credibility of the European Parliament, especially with regard to past commitments,' Raffaello Garofalo, secretary general of the European Biodiesel Board (EBB), comments. 'It is sad that legislators have been swayed by superficial arguments linking biofuels to food price rises.'

The Board goes on to point out the problems with other types of renewable energy: 'Electric car batteries will be charged in private places where the electricity delivered is only one and very predominantly of fossil origin, making it impossible to segregate and choose to run on renewable,' Garofalo adds.

The European Bioethanol Fuel Association (eBio) also criticises the move. 'The amendments adopted by the European Parliament's Industry Committee on biofuels are counterproductive in reducing our dependency on imported and polluting fossil fuels.'

The Parliament puts at risk over €5 billion invested in EU biofuel production capacity and all the employment linked to it, the association says

عذر خواهی بابت به روز نکردن وبلاگ

چند روزیه که به دلیل مسافرتم نتونستم وبلاگ را به روز کنم.

و حالا هم دارم با مکافات فارسی تایپ میکنم چون کیبوردم سوئدیه .

فعلا ....

US taking the lead in global biofuel production

The US biofuel industry is rapidly growing and leading the global biofuel industry due to government support, coming up of new projects and plants, and rising domestic demand.

US Biofuel Market Analysis, a new research report from RNCOS, anticipates the US biofuel industry, particularly ethanol production, to lead the world biofuel production during 2008-2017.

As per the report, the US has emerged as the world's largest biofuel industry, with its ethanol production soaring to 4.9 billion gallons in 2006, an increased of around 1 billion gallons from the production level in 2005, and contributed 36% of the total global ethanol production. While the growth in ethanol production was substantially high in 2006 from 2005, the industry still continues to enhance its production capacity.

Seeing this remarkable performance of the US biofuel industry, a senior research analyst at RNCOS comments that it will not be wrong to say that the global ethanol industry is centred around the US.

Moreover, the US is expected to lead the global ethanol production in future. The main reasons behind this projection, says the analyst, are the long-term government intervention (Renewable Fuels Standard policy) and setting up of more ethanol plants. Besides, continuous rise in domestic ethanol demand will encourage domestic producers to keep adding to the production volume in coming years.

The RNCOS research says that this radical rise in ethanol production in the US has virtually affected every aspect of field crops sector - from domestic demand and exports to prices, acreage allocation among crops, and even the livestock sector. Under such commodity market effects, government payments, farm income and food prices have changed significantly.

Better living through chemurgy

fforts to replace oil-based chemicals with renewable alternatives are taking off

Illustration by David Simonds

FORTY years ago Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was given a famous piece of career advice: “Just one word…plastics.” It was appropriate at the time, given that the 1960s were a golden age of petrochemical innovation. Oil was cheap and seemed limitless. Since then, scientists have kept on coming up with wondrous new products made from petroleum that helped to ensure, in the words of one corporate slogan, better living through chemistry. Even so, someone offering advice to today’s promising graduates might invoke a different, uglier word: chemurgy.

This term, coined in the 1930s, refers to a branch of applied chemistry that turns agricultural feedstocks into industrial and consumer products. It had several successes early in the 20th century. Cellulose was used to make everything from paint brushes to the film on which motion pictures were captured. George Washington Carver, an American scientist, developed hundreds of ways to convert peanuts, sweet potatoes and other crops into glue, soaps, paints, dyes and other industrial products. In the 1930s Henry Ford started using parts made from agricultural materials, and even built an all-soy car. But the outbreak of the second world war and the shift to wartime production halted his experiment. After the war, low oil prices and breakthroughs in petrochemical technologies ensured the dominance of petroleum-based plastics and chemicals.

But now chemurgy is back with a vengeance, in the shape of modern industrial biotechnology. Advances in bioengineering, environmental worries, high oil prices and new ways to improve the performance of oil-based products using biotechnology have led to a revival of interest in using agricultural feedstocks to make plastics, paints, textile fibres and other industrial products that now come from oil.

This form of biotechnology has not attracted as much attention as biotech drugs, genetically modified organisms or biofuels, but it has been quietly growing for years. BASF, a German chemical giant, estimates that bio-based products account for some €300m ($470m) of sales in such things as “chiral intermediates” (which give the kick to its pesticides). The sale of industrial enzymes by Novozymes, a Danish firm, brings in over €950m a year, about a third of it from enzymes for improving laundry detergents. Jens Riese of McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons industrial biotech’s global sales will soar to $100 billion by 2011—by which time sales of biofuels will have reached only $72 billion.

Will this boom really prove to be more sustainable than the first, ill-fated blossoming of chemurgy? One potential problem is that oil-based polymers are very good at what they do. Early bioplastics melted too easily, or proved unable to keep soft drinks fizzy when they were made into bottles. Pat Gruber, a green-chemistry guru who helped start NatureWorks (a pioneering biopolymers firm) says customers are sometimes too risk-averse to retrain staff or modify equipment to accept a new biopolymer—even if it is cheaper or better.

It seems likely that oil-based products will be around for a long time in some applications. But the big advances in oil-based polymers happened decades ago, whereas the number of patents granted for industrial biotechnology now exceeds 20,000 per year. Such is the pace of innovation, says Tjerk de Ruiter, chief executive of Genencor, a industrial-biotech firm that is now a division of Denmark’s Danisco, that processes that once took five years now take just one. And Steen Riisgaard, the boss of Novozymes, insists that new technologies can indeed push old ones out of the way, provided they are clearly superior (and not just greener). Brewers raced to adopt Novozymes’ novel enzymes, for example, in order to cash in on the Atkins Diet craze with “low carb” beers.

A second potential obstacle is that incumbent companies will quash the fledgling new technologies. But concern about oil’s reliability as a feedstock means that even oil-dependent incumbents are interested in alternatives. Oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and BP see novel bioproducts not as threats but as useful tools for blending into, and possibly extending, remaining oil reserves. And chemicals giants such as Dow and DuPont are also big fans of novel industrial biotechnologies. Chad Holliday, DuPont’s boss, is sure that Sorona, his firm’s new biofibre, will be a multi-billion dollar product and “the next nylon”. DuPont expects its sales of industrial biotechnology products to grow by 16-18% a year, to reach $1 billion by 2012.

Perhaps the biggest worry is that today’s industrial-biotech boom is an artefact of the soaring price of oil. If the oil price plunged and stayed low, the boom would surely turn to bust. Short of outright collapse, however, even a sharp price drop need not burst the biotech bubble. Mr Riese has scrutinised the economics of sugar and oil—the chief rival feedstocks—and concludes that the “bio-route” will be cheaper even at an oil price of $50-60 a barrel. Brent Erickson of BIO, an industry lobby, argues that “this was happening long before the oil-price spike—$100 oil is just gravy.” Industry bosses agree, noting that the flurry of projects now approaching commercial use were deemed viable and initiated a few years ago, when the oil price was closer to $40 a barrel.

For proof that industrial biotech is ready for the big time, look to Brazil. The country already has a large and efficient industry producing ethanol fuel from sugar cane. Now rival consortia are rushing to build plants to turn sugar cane into bioethylene. This is striking. Unlike many other industrial biotech efforts which target niche markets, this is an assault on the $114 billion market for ethylene, the most widely produced organic compound of all.

Erin O’Driscoll of Dow, a chemical giant now investing in Brazilian bioethylene, says the firm is confident the technology is ready for commercialisation. The chief reason for such optimism is that industrial biotechnology is better and cheaper than it was back in the heyday of chemurgy. Dow has even come up with a material made from soyabean oil that it plans to sell to carmakers to replace oil-based foam. Ford and his friend Carver would be proud.

Economist.com

Taiwan has enforced a 1% biodiesel mandate for all motor vehicle

Waste cooking oil will be collected from households and restaurants to produce the biodiesel required to fuel the vehicles. The higher cost of biodiesel will also be absorbed by state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp., Taiwan (CPC) and the private sector's Formosa Petrochemical Corp.

The mandate is expected to cut Taiwan's diesel consumption by 38.5 million litres a year, equivalent to about 1 million barrels of imported crude oil.

The Taiwanese government decided to roll out an island-wide biodiesel programme after a successful biodiesel trial in several parts of the island. More than 500 buses have been running on 2-5% biodiesel fuel blend in Kaohsiung City and Chiayi County in southern Taiwan since January 2007.

 

 

 

CropEnergies expands bioethanol capacity

CropEnergies expands bioethanol capacity

The original capacity of the Zeitz location has been increased by a further 100,000 m³ to 360,000 m³

Germany-based bioethanol producer CropEnergies has completed the expansion of capacity at its bioethanol plant in Zeitz, Saxony-Anhalt.

After a construction period for the extension of 13 months, the original capacity of the Zeitz location of 260,000 m³ of bioethanol a year has been increased by a further 100,000 m³ to 360,000 m³. The increase was carried out in two stages.

The existing plant, which processes cereals and sugar syrups into bioethanol, was expanded by an additional 40,000 m³ of bioethanol a year. The newly-built plant with capacity of 60,000 m³ a year exclusively processes sugar syrups originating from the neighbouring sugar factory. With this expansion, the Zeitz factory is Europe's largest bioethanol plant.

At the Zeitz plant, a total of over €50 million has been invested in the expansion of the bioethanol production.

At the end of the year, a further plant with a capacity of up to 300,000 m³ of bioethanol a year will go on stream in Wanze, Belgium. At the end of financial year 2008/09, CropEnergies will then have a capacity of over 700,000 m³ of bioethanol available a year.