Anh Vo

Dr. Benjamin
CBE 450
Chapter 14, Isomerization of N-butane to Isobutane

In this chapter, N-butane is converted to isobutene by the PFR running at approximately

400 F. The effluent is then recycled back to the original distillation column, this will join
with the fresh feed stream to enter the distillation column. The Distillate is yielded with
96 mol % of isobutene and 2 mol % of n-butane. The bottom product includes 30 mol %
of isobutane and 70 mol % of n butane. These products are then go through a vaporizer
and furnace to increase the temperature in order to feed in to the reactor the exit
temperature of the furnace was approaching 340 F.
The reactor is a tubular reactor and has a pass conversion of 70%.

The figure below shows the resulting of all the stream of the steady state simulation:
The figure below shows the completed dynamic aspen simulation. All equipment is sized
and the file is then exported into AspenDynamics.
When a decrease in recycle flow introduced, here is the response of the system, as we can
see, there was a drop in every variables
Here is the result when the inlet temperature increases: