CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

The aim of this project is to design a plant that is capable of producing formaldehyde in large
scale. Hence the conceptual design of the most feasible process has to be carried out. First,
preliminary studies on plant location, chosen technologies needed in order to produce
formaldehyde, deciding on the most feasible feedstock are done. Afterwards mass balancing,
heat integration, process simulation and an evaluation of the economic potential are done.
Based on an evaluation of the different process routes, the use of methanol as a feedstock has
been chosen. According to the different process routes like, oxidation process,
dehydrogenation process and Formox process, the last one describes the most feasible route
for large scale production of fomaldehde. A market study regarding the demand and supply of
formaldehyde and methanol shows that there is a growing demand for formaldehyde
throughout the world in the next several years. The annual production rate is 50.000 MT/year.
As plant location Gebeng is chosen due to several factors like transportation, land prices and
so on. The mode of operation is considered to be continuous with an annual 330 days of
operation.
Generally, the process can be divided into three steps. At first the feed is prepared for the
reaction in the purification stage. Afterwards the reaction takes place in the reaction stage and
subsequently the product is separated from the by-products in the separation stage. The heart
of the process, considered to be the reactor, is a fine tube packed bed reactor. The catalyst
used in the Formox process is an iron-molybdenum-oxide mixture. The energy requirement is
reduced by the use of heat integration and pinch analysis. Hence the utility consumption is
minimized by the use of grand composite curve technique and stream matching The total hot
utility consumption is 0kW while the total cold utility consumption is 3751,53kW. A process
simulation using ICON software validates the calculations like mass balances done by hand.
Plant economics?
As this project only covers the conceptual design, the detailed process design will be done in
plant design project II. The design studies were conducted within the given time frame, so the
project objectives of the plant design project I (PDPI) were met. According to our opinion,
this project has been highly helpful to enhance the knowledge in process engineering and
especially to turn the theoretical knowledge into practice. The following recommendations
can be given at that point.

Regarding the process simulation, the students have not been introduced properly to
the basics of the software. Therefore the ICON simulation took way longer than

expected. Perhaps an additional tutorial class could fix this issue.

From the observation, the time window for the final year students seems to be tightly
packed as Final Year students has other commitments as well such as the Final Year
Project and the major subjects that requires times and concentration to complete. The
plant design project consumes a lot of time and energy as it requires a lot of critical
thinking and analysis. Therefore, one of the recommendations is to extend the time
limit or reduce the requirement of the report. Previous final year students which had 6
months or 24 weeks to complete their plant design but our current batch have less than

14 weeks to achieve those requirements.

anyone has more recommendations?