The Start of Something New...

As Engineers we're often given an ill-posed problem and its our job to make it a well-posed problem. Thank God for GOOGLE!!! The team has been doing extremely well with our preliminary hand calculations.

At first when even contemplating doing this project we asked ourselves will we even make money?!? This is one of the fundamental rules of economics: Selling price should always be greater than the cost.

As Engineers we need to make some assumptions just to get an idea of what our real results will be. To calculate the Maximum profit achieved in this specific design process our team assumed that only 1 reaction of Cumene took place and it achieved 90% conversion.

Below is the reaction kinetics.




This greatly simplifies our preliminary calculations. Using simple mass balances from Mass and Energy Balance 1 we were able to determine the flow rates of propylene and benzene that are needed to produce 100k Cumene a year.

From figuring out this we were able to set up everything in terms of raw reactants. The follow table was done in excel to highlight our values.


Almost $50 million dollars it seems this process is worth doing!

~RSD