(86c) Subtle Errors That Caused Major Distillation Disasters

This is a presentation concerning several past distillation projects that were commissioned over many years. Unfortunately, each of these projects ended in a disastrous failure to meet production and/or product quality goals.

Distillation is a bedrock separation process for chemical engineers and there are many thousands of successful installations worldwide. However, this history has led, occasionally, to a sense of over-confidence for new plants that are repeat projects of “standard” designs. In other cases, careless handling of phase equilibria or equipment design details have spelled disaster.

The examples we will discuss will describe the facts of each case, the likely cause of the problems encountered, and the outcomes for the client in technical or economic terms. We will not name the parties involved but, instead, will focus on how subtle failures to follow standard design review procedures led to these unfortunate outcomes.