Introduction to Chemical Engineering Processes/Chapter 2 Practice Problems

Chapter 2 Practice Problems

Example

Problem:

1. a) A salt solution is to be concentrated by evaporating the water in a salt pan, with a condensing surface above it to gather the evaporated water. Suppose 1200g of salt solution are emptied into the pan. Once all the water is evaporated, the salt is weighed and found to weigh 100g. What percent of the original solution was water?

b) Now suppose that 0.1 L of the evaporated water was added back to the salt, to bring it to the desired concentration. How much water remains to be used elsewhere?

c) Do you think the salt solution would be safe to drink? Why or why not?

Example

Problem:

2. a) In a stone quarry, limestone is to be crushed and poured into molds for manufacture of floor tiles. Suppose that a limestone company uses three trucks, each of which is capable of carrying 3000 kg of limestone. The quarry itself is 20 miles away from the processing plant, and the trucks get there at an average speed of 30 miles/hour. Once at the plant, the limestone is ground into fine powder and then melted and poured into the molds. If each of the resulting slabs weighs 2 kg and the plant operates 24 hours a day, how many slabs can the company make in a day?

b) How could this plant become more efficient? Plot the number of slabs the company can make as a function of distance from the quarry and capacity of the trucks. What factors might keep the company from simply moving as close to the quarry as possible and using the largest trucks possible?

Example

Problem:

3. What is the volumetric flowrate of a solution with density 1.5 kg/m^3 flowing at a velocity of 5 m/s and a mass flow rate of 500 g/min? What is the area of the pipe? If it is circular, what is the radius?

Example

Problem:

4. Suppose you have a pipe that constricts halfway through from a radius of 0.5 cm to a radius of 0.2 cm. A liquid approaches the constriction at a velocity of 0.5 m/s. What is the velocity of the fluid after the constriction? (Hint: Apply conservation of mass on both sides of the constriction).

Challenge: What kind of energy does the fluid gain? Energy is never created or destroyed, so where does it come from?

Example

Problem:

5. Suppose that a river with a molar flow rate of 10000 mol/s meets another, larger river flowing at 500000 m^3/s at room temperature. What is the mass flow rate of the river downstream of the intersection if you assume steady state?

b} Evaluate the feasibility of the steady state assumption in this situation. Also qualitatively evaluate the probability that the flowrates are actually constant.

Example

Problem:

6. Suppose that the population of a certain country n years after year 2000 if there is no emigration can be modeled with the equation:

$P=2.5*10^{8}*e^{0.045*n}$

Also, suppose that in the country, a net emigration of 100,000 people per month actually occurs. What is the total accumulation of people in this country from year 2000 to 2003?

b) What was the population of people in 2002, according to this model?

c) What are some possible problems with this model? For example, what doesn't it take into account? What happens when n is 100? Where did those constants come from? Would they be the same for every country, or for the same country across generations?

Solutions