Section
Process
What the plant is actually for. Unit operations, refinery and petrochemical routes, pharma manufacturing, and the documents every other discipline works from.
- Topics
- 5
- Standards covered
- 10
Beginner
No prior knowledge assumed
What the plant actually does — the shape of a process
Every plant is built from the same short list of unit operations. How a refinery, a petrochemical complex and a pharmaceutical plant differ, and why the process engineer's decisions land on everyone else's desk.
Reading a PFD and the material balance — where every number starts
What a process flow diagram carries that a P&ID does not, how to read a stream table, why mass in equals mass out is the most useful check on a plant, and how design cases become equipment sizes.
Intermediate
Builds on the basics
Relief and flare systems — what happens when pressure wins
How relief scenarios are worked out, why the governing case is rarely the obvious one, and why nearly every part of a flare exists to stop it becoming the hazard it was built to remove.
Fired heaters — an open flame next to a hydrocarbon inventory
How a furnace is arranged, why the process fluid and flue gas travel in opposite directions, what draught and excess air actually control, and why the purge before light-off is never negotiable.
Heat integration — why the plant reuses its own heat, and what that costs
Feed-effluent exchangers, the temperature approach trade-off, why steam comes at several pressures, and why a well-integrated plant is cheap to run and hard to start.